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“‘BOYS, YOU HAVE DONE YOUR DUTY. NOW SAVE YOUR- 
SELVES' ’’ — Vaye 50 




JACK HEATON 

WIRELESS OPERATOR 

BY 

A. FREDERICK gOLLINS 

Author of Inventing for Boys^*^ Handicraft for Boys^^^ 
^*The Boys* Book of Submarines,** etc. 

WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
R. EMMETT OWEN 



NEW YORK 

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 



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Copyright, 1919, by 

Frederick A. Stokes Company 

Copyright, 1919, by 
The Sprague Publishing Company 

All rights reserved 



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TO 

DONALD DELMAR ZEITLER 

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CONTENTS 


CHAPTER page 

I How I Learned Wireless 1 

II My First Job as an Operator ... 18 

III When the ‘‘Andalusian” Went Down 36 

IV Catching Seals by Wireless .... 52 

V My Adventures in the Tropics ... 68 

VI Working with Marconi 98 

VII A Government Operator at Arlington 129 
VIII Aboard a Warship at Vera Cruz? . . 153 

IX On a Submarine Chaser 170 

X A Signalman on a Submarine . . . 190 

XI With the Field Artillery in France . 208 
XII Mustered Out 228 



ILLUSTRATIONS 


‘Boys, you have done your duty. Now save 
yourselves’ ” Frontispiece 

FACING 

PAGE 

‘The Republic is sinking and sending out 

CQD’s’” 6^ 

We were catching seals by wireless! . . . .54 

“ ‘I whipped out my gun just in time to spot a 
couple of snipers’ ” 166 

“A bright flash of blue fire shot up through the 

hole” 188^ 

Our torpedo passed through the raider’s hull and 
exploded inside 206 

“The airplane signaled down to us in code” . . 220 " 

“But for every one the boches sent we put over 
two or three” . 


226 











JACK HEATON, WIRELESS OPERATOR 



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JACK HEATON, 

WIRELESS OPERATOR 

CHAPTER I 

HOW I LEARNED WIRELESS 

I T happened out at sea about five hundred 
miles as wireless waves fly from Montclair. 
But perhaps you donT know where Montclair is 
and maybe you dohT particularly care, but as it 
is my home town I must tell you about it. First, 
it’s in New Jersey a short way from South 
Orange, where Mr. Edison, the great inventor, 
has his laboratory, and about twelve miles from 
New York City. So you see it is pretty favor- 
ably located. 

If you were a stranger going through the 
place you ’d have been surprised to see the webs 
of wires strung around every other house in 
town and on first sight you might have taken 
them for telegraph or telephone lines, or as I 
once heard a man remark to my father, ‘^They 


2 


JACK HEATON 


look like lines on which to hang the family 
wash. ’ ’ But, nay, nay, these wires, on the con- 
trary, were not used for any such commonplace 
purpose but they were, instead, aerials put up 
by wireless boys for sending and receiving mes- 
sages. 

Just about half of the fellows in our town at 
that time were wireless bugs and they ranged 
anywhere from thirteen to nineteen years of 
age, though every once in a while a full fledged 
man would be found with an outfit. Some of the 
fellows had elaborate equipments with aerials 
containing upwards of a thousand feet of wire 
and with them they could send messages to dis- 
tances of a hundred miles or so and receive them 
from powerful stations a thousand miles away. 

I don’t know who started the wireless game 
in Montclair, but I do know that it was a long 
time after I was exposed to the wireless geim 
that it took and I was interested enough to listen 
in to the news that was flashed out by ship and 
shore stations. Nearly all fellows begin wire- 
less by seeing some of their pals monkeying with 
the apparatus, and no wonder, for wireless has 
a kind of fascination about it that makes a deep 
appeal to not only boys but men. 


HOW I LEARNED WIRELESS 3 

At that time I was fifteen years old and my 
hobby was printing. I had quite an outfit, in- 
cluding a 5 X 7 self -inking press, a good layout 
of type, cases and everything. As I was a boy 
of action and wanted quick results I couldn^t 
see this idea at all of constantly adjusting a 
detector, working the slider of a tuning coil back 
and forth, looking as solemn as an owl and keep- 
ing as silent as a clam. 

There was a friend of mine named Bob Car- 
teret who had the top floor of the garage on his 
place and he had one of the best amateur outfits 
in town. A lot of us fellows used to make his 
operating room a hang-out because we could get 
into and out of it without disturbing any one or 
getting called down by anybody. Bob was a 
mighty good sport even if he did wear spectacles 
and talk like a college professor and he was al- 
ways willing to let a fellow listen in if he could 
read Morse, while for the benefit of those like 
myself who didnT know the code he would tell 
us what the fellows in our own neighborhood 
were saying or what the operators down in Vir- 
ginia, over in Ohio, up in New York State, or 
out in the Atlantic were sending. 

It was interesting enough to pick bits of news 


4 


JACK HEATON 


right out of the air, so to speak, and I noticed 
that the grown-up folks were always mighty 
keen to hear any wireless news that might hap- 
pen to come Bob’s way. In those good old days 
when amateur wireless was young any fellow 
could set up his own station, use whatever wave 
length he wanted to send with, and blab any 
news that chanced to come his way ; but all this 
was changed a few years later when the govern- 
ment found that too many amateurs were abus- 
ing these privileges. To give them a chance it 
made every one who operated or owned a wire- 
less station register it, gave him a call let- 
ter, limited the sending range of his apparatus, 
had him use waves of a certain length for send- 
ing, and made it an offense for him to give out 
any news which he might receive. And oh, the 
wail that went up all over the United States 
from the amateurs ! 

I went over to Bob’s one evening after din- 
ner — we always have dinner in the evening in 
Montclair — and as usual there was Bob sitting 
at his table listening in. Charlie Langdon, 
Howard Brice and Johnny James were there 
and they were all leaning over him looking wor- 
ried. 


HOW I LEARNED WIRELESS 5 

‘‘Hello, fellows,’^ I sang out as I opened the 
door. 

“Shut up,’’ hissed Howard, while Johnny 
punched me in the ribs with his elbow and 
Charlie showed his butter teeth and flapped his 
open hand, which in kid language means keep 
still. 

I sat down sulkily, for no self-respecting boy 
that can box the way I used to wants to be 
told to shut up, get a poke in the ribs and the 
signal to keep his face closed when he has only 
said, “HeUo, fellows.” After a minute or two 
my curiosity bristled up for I must needs know 
what was going on. I looked at Bob. His face 
was a little longer than usual, his eyes were 
glassy and stared hard and he kept adjusting 
the detector nervously. 

“What’s it all about, Howard?” I whispered 
in his ear. 

Say, you’d think I’d committed a crime the 
way he scowled at me. Then he deigned to 
make a whispered reply. 

“The Republic is sinking and is sending out 
C Q H’s.” 

I could feel my heart stop beating, the blood 
leave my head, and my body get rigid, and it’s 


6 


JACK HEATON 


just about the same kind of a feeling that comes 
over a fellow when he is on a ship that is going 
down, as I have since learned. 

Other ships were answering the Republic's 
distress signals and were headed for her but 
they were a long, long way off and it seemed 
very doubtful if they could reach her in time. 
The Republic's operator kept on sending C Q 
D^s and then her latitude and longitude. I 
stayed at Bob ’s station until dad came after me, 
which was about midnight. At first he was 
pretty sore, but when he found out what had 
kept me he relented a little. 

Well, the next day we wireless fellows — I had 
been initiated — did not take a very keen inter- 
est in our school work, for when you know a big 
ship crowded with human freight is sinking you 
donT care much whether school keeps or not. 
As soon as school was out we were all at it again 
and then after fifty-two hours of hoping against 
hope, and during all of which time Jack Binns, 
the first wireless hero, had stuck to his key on 
the ill-fated ship, help reached her and by so 
doing his duty sixteen hundred lives were saved. 

Bob took the receivers from his head and 
laid them on the table. I tell you we were an 



“‘THE REPUBLIC IS SINKING AND IS SENDING OUT C Q D’S’ ” 

— Page 5 











HOW I LEARNED WIRELESS 


7 


excited crowd and it had us going for fair. We 
all felt as if we had really something to do with 
it, instead of merely getting the news at first 
hand. It was indeed a thrilling piece of busi- 
ness, and nothing more was needed for me to 
get into the wireless game except an outfit. 

Now I don’t know whether you know anything 
about wireless, but I will say here that while you 
can only send over short distances with a good 
sized sending apparatus, you can receive over 
quite long distances with a cheap receiver if 
you have a fairly decent aerial, by which I mean 
one that is high enough above the ground and 
has a long enough stretch, and, of course, it 
must be properly insulated. Not only this, but 
a sending apparatus of any size costs much 
money and takes a lot of current to work it. 
On the other hand a receiving apparatus can be 
bought for a few dollars and can be used with- 
out any current at all, though it gives louder 
signals when a dry cell is used. 

Just as soon as my wireless pals found I’d got 
the hug they all jumped in and helped me rig up 
the aerial. We strung it up between a tree at 
the back end of our lot and the gable at the side 
of the house so that it was about fifteen feet high 


8 


JACK HEATON 


at one end, thirty feet high at the other end and 
fifty feet long — a very respectable aerial. 

We ran the leading in wire to the window of 
my printing office. Outside the window frame 
we screwed a lightning switch. Next we fast- 
ened the rat-tail of the aerial to one of the mid- 
dle posts, and from the other lower post we ran 
a wire down to the ground and into the base- 
ment, where we clamped it on to the water pipe, 
and this made the ground. This done we con- 
nected the other end of the switch with a wire 
and ran it through an insulator in the window 
sash so that it could be fixed to the instruments 
when I got them. 

^‘WonT those wires attract the lightning, 
Jack?^’ my mother asked, eyeing it dubiously 
after the aerial was all up. 

I was just about to tell her I had never 
thought of that, when Bob jumped in and ex- 
plained it all as intelligently as though he were 
Sir Oliver Lodge lecturing on wireless before 
the Eoyal Society. 

“You see, Mrs. Heaton,’^ he began, “an 
aerial when it is properly put up like this one 
really protects a house from lightning just as 
a lightning rod does, only better. Before a 


HOW I LEARNED WIRELESS 9 

storm the air is charged with electricity and 
as the aerial is connected with the ground 
through that switch up there, the electricity as 
fast as it is formed is carried to the ground 
and this prevents enough of it from gathering 
to make a lightning stroke.^’ 

Mother ^s eyes brightened hopefully as she 
looked on this smart boy. 

‘ ^ Isn ’t it wonderful ! ’ ’ she said, and went into 
the house perfectly satisfied that I was in good 
company. 

The next move on my part was to get the 
receiving apparatus. This consisted of a 
detector, a tuning coil, a dry cell, a potentio- 
meter, and a pair of head telephone receivers 
or head-phones as they are called for short. 
Bob helped me to make the detector because he 
said he could make a better detector than I 
could buy. When I got everything ready to 
hook up I was terribly nervous for I could 
hardly wait to try them out. 

I had a diagram that Charlie gave me which 
showed exactly how the instruments were con- 
nected up, and as I wanted to be able to say ‘‘I 
did it myself,^’ and without the advice or criti- 
cism of any of the fellows, I started to work on 


10 


JACK HEATON 


it as soon as I got home. I used my imposing 
table to set the apparatus on and it was not 
long before I had it all wired up as per the 
diagram. 

Verily I was a proud youth when I put on 
the head-phone, adjusted the detector and 
moved the slider of the tuning coil back and 
forth. I knew just how to do it because I had 
seen the other fellows make these same adjust- 
ments a thousand times. 

can call spirits from the vasty deep,^^ 
boasts Glendower in Shakespeare’s play of 

Henry IV.” 

^^Why, so can I, or so can any man, but will 
they come when you do call for them?” retorts 
Hotspur. 

That just about states my case, for I could 
adjust the detector and run the slider back and 
forth on the tuning coil and so can any one 
else, but to be able to get a message is quite an- 
other matter. But then perhaps, as I thought, 
no one was sending, so I telephoned over to 
Bob and asked him to send something and to 
send it slow. I went back to my receiver but 
try as I would I couldn’t get a thing. Gee, but 
it was discouraging. 


HOW I LEARNED WIRELESS ii 


In about fifteen minutes Bob popped in and 
by this time I was right glad to see him. He 
looked over the apparatus, not like an amateur 
but like a professional operator, and saw to it 
that all of the wires were tight. 

‘‘YouVe got it connected up all right and we 
ought to get it. Somebody ought to be sending 
something. 

He put on the receiver and listened, but to 
no purpose. He looked perplexed. As he was 
listening and trying to adjust the receiver, he 
glanced out of the window. 

^^You^re a great operator, you are,^’ he 
said with a rueful countenance; ‘‘how do you 
suppose you^re going to get anything 
when you haven’t got your lightning switch 
closed?” 

Well, from that day to this when anything 
goes wrong I always look first to see if all the 
switches are closed and the connections are 
tight. 

“Ollie Nichols of South Orange is telling 
Eddie Powers to meet him at the Y. M. C. A., 
and have a swim,” he said with a grin. 

Then he clapped the receiver on my head 
and I heard the signals coming in as plain as 


12 


JACK HEATON 


day, only I didn’t know what the fellows who 
were sending were talking about. 

To make a long, and for me a most pleasant, 
story short I learned the Continental Morse 
Code which was used by all Marconi stations 
and when I got so I could read the hid stations 
in and around Montclair, I began to branch out 
and pick up the commercial stations. 

In those early days, although it was only ten 
years ago, the regular operators didn’t send as 
fast as they do now and this made it quite easy 
to read them. It was not many weeks before 
I could double discount Bob on receiving, but 
he was always a shark on the theory of the 
thing. What he didn’t know about electric 
waves, electric oscillations, disruptive dis- 
charges, tuning open and closed circuits and all 
the rest of that deep stuff was, to my way of 
thinking, not worth knowing. Bob lived up to 
his reputation for he graduated from Prince- 
ton, got a Ph.D. degree, became a Captain in 
the Signal Corps of the Army and is now some- 
where in France. 

I was quite well satisfied for a long while 
just to listen in, but finally the novelty of the 
thing wore off and I felt that I must needs 


HOW I LEARNED WIRELESS 13 

send also. My first transmitter was made up 
of a one-inch spark coil, a Leyden jar con- 
denser, a tuning coil, a key and a lot of dry 
cells. As I was now in possession of a com- 
plete station, when the other kid stations 
wanted me they used to signal J K H and these 
remained my call letters until the government 
took a hand in wireless. Thus it was I landed 
at last fairly and squarely in the amateur 
class. 

My wireless proclivities w'ere getting the bet- 
ter of my scholastic training and my folks were 
quite worried over and more than tired of it. 
So one sweet day dad and I had a long talk 
and he did the most of it. 

Wireless, he said gently but firmly, ‘4s 
a good horse if you donT ride it to death, but 
that is just what you are doing. There isnT 
a minute of the time you are in the house, 
when you are not eating or sleeping, that you 
haven't got that pair of receivers glued to your 
ea’r.s. ' ' 

“But, dad, next to Bob, I get the highest 
marks in physics in my class and I'm nearly a 
year younger than he is too. Why I can tell 
the prof things he doesn't know about the emis- 


JACK HEATON 


14 

sion, propagation and reception of electromag- 
netic waves/’ I enthused, pulling off some of 
that heavy, theoretical stuff of Bob’s. 

^ ^ That is all very well, ’ ’ he came back, ‘ ‘ and 
I’m glad you can talk so understandingly, at 
least to your father, but those big words are 
not getting you anywhere in algebra and that’s 
the point at issue.” 

Then suddenly veering the subject he asked, 
^‘How far can you send a message with that 
coil apparatus there?” 

couple of miles in daylight if the atmos- 
phere is right and about twice that far at night 
if there is not too much interference. You 
see — ” 

^‘How much would an apparatus cost that 
had power enough to send say twenty miles?” 
he broke in. 

About fifty dollars, I guess,” I made reply. 

^^Then let’s strike a bargain. It’s two 
months till school is out and if you will bend 
your efforts and pass everything — everything, 
mind you — I ’ll see to it that you have a sending 
outfit that’s worth something.” 

^^Dad, you’re all right,” I ejaculated, shaking 
his hand warmly. 


HOW I LEARNED WIRELESS 15 

^‘And you’re all right, too, Jack, if you’ll 
only speed up in your studies a bit.” 

The result was that both dad and I made good. 
He was pleased with my work and I was tickled 
most to death with my new half -kilowatt trans- 
mitter. But that is what you call buying an 
education for a fellow twice. It’s a shabby 
trick to work on one’s folks and I’ve often 
thought about it since. The only way I can ease 
off my conscience is by considering that this 
mild kind of bribery has been worked by nearly 
all fond parents in one way or another ever 
since the world began. 

Hardly had I installed my new transmitter 
than summer was upon us and we were rushing 
off for our annual vacation at the seashore. 
Not far from Asbury Park, where we were to 
spend the heated months, there was a Marconi 
station. I had a brilliant idea and to the end of 
trying it out, I made a box about four inches 
high, six inches wide and twelve inches long 
with a good lid to it and fitted it with hinges, 
clasps and a handle. 

I arranged my receiving apparatus so that it 
would all go snugly into the box — that is, I made 
a portable receiver of it. Then I got a spool of 


i6 


JACK HEATON 


No. 18 copper wire, three or four porcelain knob 
insulators, a screw driver and a pair of pliers, 
and I was ready for business. 

When we were inducted in our hotel, which 
was to be our home for the next couple of 
months, I strung the wire lengthwise across the 
roof, supporting it on the insulators. I brought 
the free end of the wire down the side of the 
hotel and into my room which was on the sixth 
floor. I connected the aerial wire to one of the 
binding posts of my portable receiver and the 
other binding post to the water pipe in the bath 
room. Talk about messages ! Why I got them 
from all over New Jersey when the big stations 
were working. 

Some one told the manager (Ifll bet it was 
the elevator boy I had had the run-in with the 
first day I rode up with him) and he nearly 
spoilt everything, for he made me take the wire 
down. But I foxed him. I hooked the aerial 
end to a brass bed and with this arrangement I 
could get a couple of the nearest big stations, 
but of course not so clear and loud. Sometimes 
I could even pick up a coastwise steamer which 
carried the United Wireless Company's appa- 
ratus and on two or three occasions I had the 


HOW I LEARNED WIRELESS 17 

pleasure of listening to a conversation between 
two transatlantic liners. I suppose if the 
manager of the hotel had known about it, he^d 
have charged me extra for using the bed as an 
aerial. 

It showed me, though, that there were great 
possibilities in wireless and that we may yet be 
able to talk with the inhabitants of Mars. I 
wanted to get into wireless deeper and I did. 


CHAPTER II 


MY FIKST JOB AS AN OPERATOR 

J UST before the Christmas holidays my 
father, who was the New York manager of 
the Singer Crude Oil Engine Company , told 
mother and me that he had to make a business 
trip to Nicaragua. 

There was nothing exciting in this announce- 
ment for dad went otf on business trips quite 
often, but when he said that he would take us 
with him and we’d go by steamer I immediately 
sat up and took notice, for I had wanted to make 
a sea voyage ever since I could remember. 

It may seem a little queer but although I 
lived almost within sight of the old Atlantic 
and picked up messages right along from coast 
liners, the only trip I had ever made was on a 
little steam launch that takes unwary pleasure 
victims from Asbury Park outbound toward 
Europe for about ten miles, or until every one’s 

i8 


MY FIRST JOB 


19 

gizzard is turned wrong-side-out (much to the 
delight of the fishes) and back again. 

I said every one was sea-sick nigh unto death 
but as a matter of fact there were just three hu- 
man beings aboard the Snail that were able to 
step ashore like sober folks and walk a fairly 
straight line. I don’t want to do any bragging 
but these sole survivors of mal-de-mer were the 
captain and the engineer, who made up the crew, 
and yours truly. 

To make a real ocean voyage on a sure enough 
steamer meant something more to me than just 
a sea-going trip, for a law had been passed 
some time before making it compulsory for all 
ocean passenger vessels to have a wireless out- 
fit aboard and I was just hugs to see a regular 
ship set in operation. 

For the next few days everything around 
home was a hurry-up place — ^like going away 
for the summer — and I was mighty glad when 
at last we took the Erie (not weary) railroad 
for Jersey City, where the Pan-American Line 
had its docks. Once there, a couple of porters 
relieved us of our numerous pieces of hand bag- 
gage, and trailing along in the rear of dad and 
mom, I came aboard feeling like a duke. 


20 


JACK HEATON 


After we were shown our staterooms by the 
steward I made a bee-line for the wireless room, 
but found it locked, the operator not yet having 
put in an appearance. To kill time till he came 
I went up on the hurricane deck, that is the up- 
per deck, to take a look at the aerial. 

It was formed of a couple of parallel wires 
about 200 feet long suspended between the masts 
and insulated from them by strain insulators 
of the kind that was then known as the Navy 
type, I was standing close to one of the fun- 
nels looking up at the aerial, which seemed to me 
to be a middling one — I had seen better and 
worse in Montclair — ^when all of a sudden there 
was a terrific noise set up and for a second I 
failed to cohere — that is I was nearly scared 
stiff. In an instant my jigger was right again, 
for it was only the ship’s whistle blowing its 
deep throated blast to let those who had come 
aboard to say good-by to their friends who were 
sailing, know that it was time to go ashore, and 
to those ashore who wanted to take the boat 
know that they had better get a move on them if 
they expected to make it. 

When I got back to the wireless room there 
was quite a collection of people crowded around 


MY FIRST JOB 


21 


the little window, but whether for the purpose 
of sending messages or out of curiosity I didn’t 
know. I stood about as much chance of getting 
up to that window as a fellow has of getting on 
a subway express at Brooklyn Bridge during 
the rush hour. 

I went away in disgust and didn’t go back 
again until we had sailed down the river, passed 
through the Narrows and had dropped the pilot 
out at sea. 

Suddenly I heard the ze — ze — zi'p — zip — zippy 
snap of the sparks of the transmitter as the 
operator began to send, and I rushed madly to 
the wireless room. As I ran down the passage- 
way I read — . . . . — . — that isB R T^B R T, 
B R Tj at intervals of every two or three min- 
utes; B R T was the call letter of some shore 
station that the operator was trying to get, but 
without my book, which gave the call letters of 
the ditferent ship and shore stations, I couldn’t 
tell which one it was. 

You know, of course, that when a vessel wants 
to talk to a station either on ship or shore the 
first thing the operator does is to listen-in — to 
make sure that he will not interfere with mes- 
sages that are being exchanged between other 


22 


JACK HEATON 


stations within his range. If the ether isn’t 
too busy he then sends the call letter of the 
station he wants. 

On reaching the wireless room I found a big- 
ger crowd congregated around the window than 
ever for the zip — zippy crackle of the sparks as 
they broke down the air between the spark-gap 
electrodes had attracted the curious even as 
honey attracts insects of the Musca domestica 
family, i.e., houseflies, and I couldn’t get within 
six feet of it. 

There was a short lull while the operator 
looked over a message which a little man with 
red hair and a pepper and salt suit had written 
out. When the operator started to send again 
I read off the name of our ship, the state of the 
weather and the number of words he intended 
to send, all of which was in accordance with the 
regular routine prescribed by the rules and 
regulations of the company for governing com- 
munications by wireless between ships and 
shore stations. The message ran like this: 

For fear you may not know the Morse code 
which was used by all coastwise steamers in 
those early days, I will do it into English for 
you. 


MY FIRST JOB 


23 



S G, which I afterwards looked up, was, 1 
found, a station at Sea Gate which was on the 
coast. Vinalos was the name of our ship. 
Fine meant the state of the weather. Fifteen 
indicated the number of words the message con- 
tained. 

I laughed at the man who forgot, but nobody 
else laughed because there was probably not one 
among them who knew the difference between a 
binding post and an electric wave. 

All of that afternoon I read the outgoing 
messages, but I felt I was losing something by 
not getting what was coming in. Then a bril- 


24 


JACK HEATON 


liant idea struck me and I immediately pro- 
ceeded to put it into execution with the result 
that it almost electrocuted me. 

I took out my little portable receiving set, 
hooked a wire to the detector and the other end 
to the electric light fixture for a ground which, 
from what I had read about ship stations, I 
had reason to believe made a connection with 
the steel hull of the ship. Being so close to the 
2 kilowatt (about 2% horsepower) transmitter, 
one side of the spark-gap of which also made 
connection with the hull, I hadn’t the slight- 
est doubt but that I could receive without an 
aerial and I certainly did, but the kind wasn’t 
right. 

No sooner had I put on my head-phones 
and my fingers on the adjusting screw of the 
detector than zip, zum, bang, boom, and I re- 
ceived a terrific shock that lifted me clear off 
the edge of my bunk ; I hung suspended in mid- 
air ’tween decks (or so it seemed) and to give 
verisimilitude to the levitation act, I recoiled 
like a 12-inch gun and hit the floor with a dull 
thud. I was glad the man I laughed at because 
he forgot, was not there to laugh at the fellow’ 
who didn ’t know. 


MY FIRST JOB 


25 


When I had fnlly come to and was able to use 
my thinker again I knocked the wire off of the 
electric light fixture and then proceeded to ex- 
amine my receiver to see if anything had been 
damaged. Beyond burning off the point of 
my detector there was no scathe done, and I 
overhauled it and put the instrument back in its 
box. 

My next move was to see the operator and 
hold some small wireless talk with him. It was 
now late in the afternoon and when I got back 
it overjoyed me to find that the crowd who hun- 
gered to penetrate the mystery of sending mes- 
sages without wires had fathomed its very 
depths and departed, that is, all except one 
young couple who were from Missouri, accord- 
ing to the passenger list, and of course they 
must needs be shown. 

The moment I saw the operator's face I set 
him down for one of those fresh young fellows 
you meet everywhere and I did not miss my 
guess. Now you would hardly believe it, but it 
is nevertheless true, that there are a few op- 
erators who think it smart and a great joke to 
tell land-lubbers anything but the truth when- 
ever they are questioned about wireless. 


26 


JACK HEATON 


‘‘What I can’t understand,” said the young 
woman, “is how you can send out a wireless 
message when the wind is blowing so hard.” 

If the operator had been even a 14-carat gen- 
tleman he would have told her that when he 
works the key a low pressure current of elec- 
tricity is broken up into dots and dashes repre- 
senting letters and that this intermittent cur- 
rent flowing through the coil of the transmitter 
is changed into high frequency oscillations by 
the spark; the oscillations then surge through 
the aerial wire and their energy is emitted from 
the aerial in the form of electric waves. These 
electric waves are exactly the same as light 
waves, except that they are very much longer, 
and both are transmitted by, in and through the 
ether. Hence the wind, which is air in motion, 
has nothing at all to do with it. 

This would have been the real scientific ex- 
planation of how a message is sent and while it 
would, more than likely, have been as clear as 
mud to her young inquiring mind, still if she 
could not grasp the true explanation of how it 
works it would have been her misfortune and 
not the operator’s fault. See? 


MY FIRST JOB 


27 

But did he tell the lady straight? You could 
have told from his physio g that he would not. 
Instead he went on at great length and framed 
up a story of how the wind had once blown a 
message he had sent far out of its course and 
then suddenly veering round it blew it hack 
again and he caught his own message several 
minutes later when he was listening-in for the 
reply. This he claimed, with great seriousness 
was due to the low power of his instruments 
and a fouled aerial. 

‘^Are you having any trouble now on account 
of the wind?^’ continued the young woman 
deeply interested. 

^^None at all, because you see I am using a 
four horsepower spark and I have just had my 
aerial sandpapered and oiled and the waves slip 
off without the slightest difficulty.^’ 

This little speech gave me another shock, but 
I had a third one coming and forthwith got it. 

‘‘How are they coming in?” I asked, leaning 
against the window after the couple had gone. 

“What do you mean?” he questioned as he 
looked at me through half closed eyes in a way 
I didn’t fancy. 


28 


JACK HEATON 


^‘Why the messages?^’ 

‘‘Through the window/’ he returned shortly, 
and went back to his key. 

I stuck around the window and took a good 
look at the instruments which to my way of 
thinking weren’t much, in fact a lot of fellows 
in Montclair had outfits that put his way in the 
shade except that they were not as powerful. 
I couldn’t see why he was so swelled on him- 
self. 

He began calling again and after he had put 
through his message I repeated it out loud as 
though I was talking to myself, just to let him 
know that I knew. 

He took otf his head-phones, came over to the 
window and smiled a thin-lipped smile which 
was anything but friendly. 

“3o you’re another one of those wireless kids, 
eh?” 

“Yes, I have a pretty good wireless set. I 
live in Montclair and very often I hear Key 
West,” I told him with some pride. 

The way he warmed up to me was something 
wonderful and in all my experience as an op- 
erator I have never met another of exactly his 
wave length. 


MY FIRST JOB 


29 


^‘You kids,’^ he said, pointing his long bony 
finger at my right eye, ‘'make life a nightmare 
for us professionals. Every kid that knows 
how to splice a wire seems to be crazy to send 
messages. Ninety-nine out of a hundred know 
nothing of wireless and their signals are simply 
a jumble of sparks. 

“A kid has no business learning wireless at 
all. I can tune out amateur low power stations, 
but they are always breaking in in the middle 
of a message. I haven ^t got any use for a wire- 
less kid. So hotfoot it and don’t hang around 
here any more. ’ ’ 

This was too much for even a fellow with a 
cast-iron nerve like mine, so I turned on my heel, 
said sore-head under my breath and took a walk 
on the promenade deck. He was the first pro- 
fessional operator I had ever met and I was 
certainly disappointed in the way he treated a 
brother operator. I wondered then if all pro- 
fessional operators had his kind of a grouch 
and if so, I didn ’t want to be one of them. 

Not to be out-generaled I thought I’d try one 
more scheme and that was to use a couple of 
pieces of wire five or six feet long for the aerial 
and ground, hook them on to the detector of 


30 


JACK HEATON 


my receiver, fix the free end of the aerial over 
the window and lay the free end of the ground 
wire on the floor. In this way there would be 
no direct metal connection between his transmit- 
ter and my receiver. 

The waves from his set were so powerful that 
they easily bridged the gap and I listened-in 
whenever I wanted to and knew everybody’s 
business on board all the way down to Eealjo. 
But I kept away from the wireless room and 
that operator. Before we landed I found out 
from the second officer that the operator was 
only a substitute for the regular one and that 
it was the second trip he had ever made. 

After a stay of a couple of weeks in Eealjo 
we started back for New York on the Almirante. 
I didn’t know whether to tackle making friends 
with the operator or not. I had swallowed a 
pretty bitter wireless pill on the way down and 
didn’t care about repeating the dose. 

The second day out I ventured close enough 
to the instrument room to see what the out- 
fit looked like and to size up the operator in 
charge. 

He was a big fellow with a full rounded face 


MY FIRST JOB 


31 


and every little while he would whistle a popular 
air which fitted in nicely with the bright sun- 
shine that flooded the room. At the same time 
he would listen-in and finally he sent 0. K., 
which in the wireless code means that he had 
heard the operator of the distant station who 
was calling him and that he was ready to take 
his message. 

Of course I couldn^t tell what was coming in 
but I was aching to put those head-phones on 
just once. When he had finished writing out 
the message he put it in an envelope and started 
to leave the room. Spotting me standing by 
he beamed pleasantly. 

^^Oh! I say, boy, I wonder if you would be 
so kind and condescending as to take this mes- 
sage to the Captain? Some other messages 
are likely to come in and I don’t want to leave 
my post.” 

Would I carry a message to the Captain? 
Why I’d carry one to the King of Abyssinia 
for a pleasant word from any professional op- 
erator. I felt that there was my chance to get 
a stand-in with his royal highness, the wire- 
less man. 


32 


JACK HEATON 


After delivering the message to the Captain 
I returned with alacrity to the window of the 
wireless room. The operator loosened up but 
I didnT tell him I was one of those fellows too. 
I had learned at first hand that professional 
operators hadn’t any use for wireless kids and 
that the only way to be friends with one was 
to be as dumb as a clam as far as wireless was 
concerned. 

This scheme worked out fine for after some 
talk he asked me of his own accord if I’d like 
to take a look at the apparatus. He opened 
the door and told me to ‘^come right in” al- 
though on a card tacked on the wall in plain 
sight was printed this legend: 


Service Regulations for Operators. 

(1) The instrument room is strictly private. 
No strangers are allowed on the premises 
without a signed permit from the Man- 
aging Director. 


And this was followed by a dozen or more other 
rules and regulations. 

When I got inside the room the operator, 
whose name was Bathwick, began pointing out 


MY FIRST JOB 


33 


which part of the apparatus was the sender and 
which made up the receiver; this was the key; 
that the sending tuning coil, over here the con- 
denser; under the table the transformer; on 
the wall the spark-gap; and altogether these 
make up the transmitter. This the crystal de- 
tector, the potentiometer, the tuning coil, the 
variable condenser and the head-phones make 
up the receiver and, finally the aerial switch, or 
throwover switch as it is called, the purpose of 
which is to enable the operator to connect the 
aerial with the transmitter or the receiver, de- 
pending on whether he wants to send or to re- 
ceive. 

I acted as if I had never seen a wireless set 
before; all went well until he had finished and 
then I let the cat out of the bag. He had a 
peculiar kind of a loose-coupled tuning coil 
that I had never seen before and I asked him 
how it was wound. He grinned at me with his 
big mouth and blue eyes and put out his open 
hand, palm side up. 

‘‘Put it there, pal,’’ he said. was a wire- 
less kid myself once.” We shook hands and it 
put me next to the fact that all professional 
operators are not alike and at the same time it 


34 


JACK HEATON 


gave me a pass to the wireless room whenever I 
wanted it. I almost lived there the rest of the 
voyage. 

Harry — I mean Bathwick — and I got so thick 
we began calling each other by our first names. 
He let me listen-in whenever I wanted to, and 
then after telling me all about the service regu- 
lations that had to do with the order in which 
the messages were sent, he let me try my hand 
at sending. 

One night when we were off Cape Hatteras 
and a furious gale was blowing Harry got sud- 
denly sick and as this is the worst part of the 
whole trip the Captain was in a quandary about 
his wireless messages. Harry told him that I 
could work the instruments and to put me in his 
place. The Captain seemed doubtful at first 
because of my age, but there was nothing else 
he could do. 

Naturally I made a few mistakes but at that 
I was pretty successful and I had the distinc- 
tion, so the Captain told my father, of being the 
youngest operator on board ship on record. 

Well, the gist of it all was that when I gradu- 
ated from High School in the spring and wanted 
a job as an operator I made application to the 


MY FIRST JOB 


35 


United Wireless Company, which at that time 
controlled about all the coastwise steamers, and, 
armed with a letter of recommendation from 
Captain Harding of the Almirante, I got it on 
the good ship Carlos Madino. 

The year I was the operator on this ship I 
visited many Central American ports. I be- 
came more and more imbued with the desire to 
see farther around the corners of the great 
round world and I think I can safely say I have 
done so in a fairly creditable manner. 


CHAPTER III 


WHEN THE ANDALVSIAN WENT DOWN 

S I have said, I was in the coastwise trade 



xjl for nearly a year, and could savvy any- 
thing in English or Spanish, Morse or Con- 
tinental, that the old-time operators were able 
to send. I had sent and received messages of 
every description and for every conceivable 
purpose. 

Why, once a brother operator and I married a 
maid who was on board my ship to a man some- 
where in Panama by wireless. Of course there 
was a minister at each end to help the ceremony 
along but it was we operators who really did 
it with our wireless sets. 

Another time while we were running through 
a storm it was my pleasant duty to flash the 
tidings ashore that a stork had overtaken us 
and added two more to our passenger list, both 
consigned, to use a maritime term, to the same 
family. 


36 


THE ANDALUSIAN 


37 


The most exciting time I had while I was on 
the Carlos Madino was when we were taking a 
cargo of munitions to the Nicaraguan govern- 
ment and which we had orders to land at 
‘ ‘ Alvar ada,’’ the headquarters of the Army. 

When we were within a day’s run of that port 
I heard the call CM CM CM which was our 
ship. I sent my 0. K, and then got a message 
for the Captain which told him to land the cargo 
at ‘^Grayville” as the insurgents were watching 
‘‘Alvarada.” It was signed Strada, Minister 
of War, Nicaragua. 

I took this important message to the Cap- 
tain myself and we were soon headed for ‘‘Gray- 
ville. ’ ’ Several other messages passed between 
the Captain and the Minister of War and it 
struck me that the signals were the strongest 
I had ever received for the distance covered ; in 
fact they were strong enough for a 5 kilowatt 
transmitter instead of a 2 kilowatt transmitter 
which I knew was installed at the station at 
‘ ‘ Alvarada. ’ ’ 

My first thought was that I had struck some 
highly sensitive spot on my crystal and I tested 
it out only to find that wherever I put the wire 
point on it the signals came in just as clear 


38 JACK HEATON 

and loud. I wondered. While I am not the 
seventh son of a son-of-a-gnn nor do I claim 
any supernatural powers I got the hunch that 
down here in tropic waters where insurrections 
are the rule and not the exception all was not 
as it should be. 

I told the Captain about it and while he 
didn’t take much stock in the idea he had a 
search made of the ship. One of the room 
stewards reported that he had found an elec- 
tric cord with a plug end hanging from a lamp 
socket in room 138. It might have been for an 
electric iron, for a hot-water heater or any one 
of a dozen other electric appliances, he said, but 
it looked suspicious. 

A more thorough search of room 138, in which 
the Captain and I took part, revealed a heavy 
suit case under the bunk, which had a place to 
plug in the cord, another for the receivers, and 
a key — at least this was my theory. A strict 
watch was kept on the stateroom and I went 
back and sent GA, which was the call for 
^‘Alvarada” every few minutes. 

In the course of fifteen minutes or so I got 
the OK of the operator at GA. The steward 
who had entered the stateroom adjoining the 


THE ANDALUSIAN 


39 


one occupied by the suspect heard the faintest 
sounds of sparks coming from it. After this 
report I made a careful examination of my 
aerial and found that the leading-in wire from 
it which connected with my aerial switch had 
been cut while the end of the wire from my in- 
struments had been connected to a wire so small 
it could scarcely be seen and this wire led to 
state-room 138. 

After connecting my instruments to the aerial 
again I immediately got in touch with the sta- 
tion at ‘‘Alvarada’^ and learned that no orders 
had been given by the Minister of War to 
change our port of destination. The Captain 
had the protesting passenger put in irons to be 
turned over to the government officials of Nica- 
ragua and thus it was that another small insur- 
rection was knocked in the head. 

I had filed an application with the Marconi 
Company of America for a job on one of their 
transatlantic ships; it was in for nearly three 
months and I had long since concluded that it 
and I were pigeonholed. My great ambition 
now was to get a berth on one of the big ships 
that crossed the pond. Various operators had 
told me that it was useless to try to get in with 


40 


JACK HEATON 


the Marconi Company because the latter em- 
ployed only operators who received their train- 
ing in the Marconi wireless schools abroad. 

Be that as it may on one of my return trips 
my father handed me a note from the Chief 
Engineer of the Marconi Company to see him. 
I did so and the result of that interview gave 
me the post of Chief Wireless officer of the s. s. 
Andalusian, one of the largest ships of the 
Blue Star Line. 

Her route was between New York and Liver- 
pool. Built by Harlan and Woltf of Belfast, 
Ireland, she was launched in 1901 and fitted 
for the transatlantic service in 1902. She was 
over 600 feet long, her breadth was nearly 70 
feet and her depth was 40 feet. Talk about a 
ship, boy, the Andalusian was as far ahead of 
the Carlos Madino as that ship was ahead of a 
lifeboat. 

The aerial of the Andalusian was formed of 
two wires 375 feet long and suspended between 
her top-gallant masts 200 feet above the sea 
and were held apart by two 8-foot spreaders. 
She was one of the first ships to be fitted with 
wireless and her wireless room was a specially 


THE ANDALUSIAN 


41 

built room on the port side of the forward 
saloon deck. 

Although the apparatus was of the old Mar- 
coni type, having been installed when the ship 
was built, we could send from 300 to 400 miles 
with it and receive four times that distance. 
The transmitter was formed of two 10 inch in- 
duction coils the primaries of which were con- 
nected in series and the secondaries in parallel 
so that while the length of the spark was still 
10 inches it was twice as fat and hence propor- 
tionately more powerful. 

There was a jigger, as Marconi called his 
tuning coil, and a battery of 18 Leyden jars 
made up the condenser for tuning the sending 
circuits. It was also fitted with a new kind 
of a key invented by Sammis who was at that 
time the chief engineer of the Marconi Com- 
pany of America. 

He called it a changeover switch but it was 
really a key and an aerial switch combined. 
In order to connect the receiver with the aerial 
all you had to do was to turn the key, which was 
on a pivot, to the right. When the key was 
turned it also cut off the current from the 


42 JACK HEATON 

transmitter by breaking the sliding contact be- 
tween them. 

To throw on the transmitter and cut off the 
receiver you simply turned the key back to its 
normal position and this made the connection 
between the aerial and tuning coil and at the 
same time it closed the circuit connecting the 
source of current with the induction coils. 

The up-to-date feature of this set was the 
storage battery which provided an auxiliary 
source of current so that in the event of the 
ship becoming disabled and water flooding the 
engine room, which would put the dynamo out of 
commission, the storage battery in the operat- 
ing room could be thrown in and C Q D could 
be sent out as long as the wireless room re- 
mained above water. This was a mighty good 
piece of hindsight, for ships that might other- 
wise have been saved by wireless had gone 
down at sea with passengers, crew and cargo 
simply because the dynamos were drowned out. 

The receiver was different from the one I 
used on the Carlos Madino for instead of a 
crystal detector we had a magnetic detector 
which Marconi had recently invented. While 
the magnetic detector was not nearly as sensi- 


THE ANDALUSIAN 


43 


tive as a crystal detector when you found a 
sensitive spot on the latter, still there were no 
adjustments to be constantly made as with the 
former. 

Now IVe told you something about the ship 
and her wireless equipment and right here I 
want to introduce Algernon Percy Jeems, Sec- 
ond Wireless Officer of the Andalusian and my 
assistant. Perce, as I called him, looked his 
name and lived up to it. He was as thorough- 
bred a gentleman as ever worked a key. 

He wasn^t very big in body — only 5 foot 4 — 
and he was of very frail build but he proved 
to be a giant when it came to sheer bravery and 
as for meeting death when duty called he was 
absolutely unafraid. In fact when he saw the 
grim old reaper bearing down on him he went 
out of his way to grasp him by the hand and 
said: ^‘When I get through with this message 
I’ll be ready to go with you.” And he did ! 

Before I tell you what happened to the 
Andalusian and of the heroic nerve of Jeems, 
I want you to know what C Q D means and how 
it came to be used as a distress signal. It was 
not until Jack Binns, who stuck to his key for 
52 hours on the ill-fated Republic and by so do- 


44 


JACK HEATON 


ing saved the lives of 1600 passengers and crew 
on board that C Q D came to be known the 
world over as a distress signal. 

In the Continental code, which is used all over 
Europe by the wire telegraph lines, C Q means 
that every operator on the line shall give at- 
tention to the message which is to follow. It 
was natural then that when wireless apparatus 
began to be installed on ships that the Con- 
tinental code should be the one used. C Q was 
the call signal employed to mean that every 
operator was to give attention to the message 
to follow, just as in the wire systems, or as it is 
said on shipboard to stand hy. 

Then the Marconi Company added the letter 
D which means danger, hence C Q D means 
stand hy danger and when this signal is received 
by an operator at sea, no matter how important 
the message that he is sending or receiving may 
be, he drops it at once and answers the C Q D 
signal to find out what the trouble is. 

Now to go on with the story : We sailed from 
Liverpool about noon on the 15th of March 
for New York with a full passenger list and a 
valuable cargo. The first couple of days out 
the weather was fairly decent but as usual at 


THE ANDALUSIAN 


45 

this time of the year we ran into a real winter 
gale. We were struck time and again by moun- 
tainous seas. One gigantic wave that broke 
over her bow tore away a part of the bridge, 
others poured through ventilators and nearly 
every time she was hit more damage was done. 
To make matters worse the high winds drove 
us out of our course. 

Although a sharp watch was kept it was so 
dark at night the lookout couldnT see his hand 
an arm’s length before his eyes though he might 
have been able to see a ship’s lights ahead had 
one been bearing down on us. As the Captain 
had been on the bridge continuously for three 
days and nights I felt it was my duty as the 
first wireless officer to stick to my key, and 
though it was Perce’s watch I told him to turn 
in. 

About midnight I heard the hull scrape 
against something that sounded as though she’d 
struck bottom when crossing a bar, or perhaps 
it was' an iceberg. She keeled over until I 
thought she was a goner but straining and giv- 
ing in every part of her superstructure she 
gradually rolled back and righted herself again. 

The saloon and second cabin passengers came 


JACK HEATON 


46 

tumbling out of their rooms in nighties and 
pajamas but what they lacked in clothes they 
made up in life preservers. Wherever you 
find danger there you will find among the panic- 
stricken a few cool, calm and collected men and 
women and sure enough two or three men and 
as many women appeared a few minutes later 
fully dressed and ready for anything that might 
happen. The officers assured all hands that 
nothing had or could happen and nearly all of 
them returned to their rooms. 

The third class passengers were locked in 
the steerage and here pandemonium reigned. 
They pounded on the hatchways and demanded 
that they be allowed to go on deck; they were 
scared stiff. Like the other and more for- 
tunate passengers they were soon quieted by 
cool headed stewards and returned to their 
miserable quarters in the fo’casde. 

Within the next couple of hours one of the 
assistant engineers discovered that the seams 
of the hull had parted aft and the water was 
pouring into her hold. The Captain ordered 
all the bulkhead doors closed, to keep the water 
out of the other compartments, and her great 
pumps going, but once started the mighty pres- 


THE ANDALUSIAN 


47 


sure of the inrushing water ripped her seams 
farther along and broadened the gap. Know- 
ing she could not stay afloat for any great length 
of time the Captain ordered me to send out 
the call for help and to be quick about it. 

I got busy with the key sending out C Q D 
C Q D C Q D listening-in between the calls as 
I never listened before to get an 0 K to my 
signals. It seemed as if all the operators were 
either asleep, dead or on the other side of the 
Equator, but after an eternity of time — ^which 
probably amounted to as much as five minutes 
by the clock — I caught tho signal 0 K and then, 
‘‘what^s up, old man.’’ 

It was the s. s. Arapahoe that had answered 
and I was nearly frantic with joy for I felt 
that all of the responsibility for saving those 
1200 souls on board rested entirely on me. I 
sent back the name of our ship, told him we were 
fast sinking, gave our latitude and longitude 
so that the Arapahoe would know where to find 
us if by good fortune we were still afloat when 
she reached us and, I added ‘^for God’s sake 
put on all speed.” 

In the meantime all the passengers had been 
notified, told to dress and to put on their life 


JACK HEATON 


48 

preservers while the sailors had been ordered 
to man the life-boats. When the passengers 
came on deck the situation was calmly explained 
to them together with the hopeful information 
that three steamers were bound for us as fast 
as steam could carry them for I had got the 
0 K from two others — the Morocco and the 
Carlisle. 

There was, on the whole, very little excite- 
ment now among the saloon and second-class 
passengers, and, curiously enough, I observed 
that those who had been seasick nigh unto death 
seemed to forget their ailment in the face of 
danger and had their sea-legs on well enough 
to look after their own safety. It proves, I 
think, that seasickness is largely a matter of 
an exaggerated imagination plus a lack of will 
power. 

Before the hatches were opened to let the 
steerage passengers out of their hole and on 
to the lower deck the Captain and one of his 
officers took their places on the main deck for- 
ward where they could watch every move the 
poor frightened mob made. They came helter- 
skelter up the hatchways falling all over them- 
selves and everybody else, but when they saw 


THE ANDALUSIAN 


49 


the Captain and the officer towering above them 
each with a brace of horse-pistols leveled at 
them like young cannon they eased off a bit their 
desire to be saved at the expense of others and 
the stewards had no further trouble with them. 

Just then Perce got awake and hearing the 
gruff orders of the officers, the throbbing of the 
big pumps and the loud and excited talk of the 
passengers, he wanted to know the cause of it. 

^‘The ship is sinking! so get up right away,^^ 
I exclaimed as evenly as my voice would let me 
and working the key for dear life. 

‘‘Oh, she is, is she,’’ he yawned as if it was 
an every-day occurrence. There was no ex- 
citability in Perce’s makeup. 

Well, sir, we kept her afloat until daylight 
when the Captain ordered every one to the life- 
boats, women and children first. 

Perce and I stuck to our instruments, keeping 
the ether busy and every now and then sending 
out cheery bulletins to the passengers, the gist 
of them all being that help was almost at hand. 

I could feel the ship begin to settle and the 
life-boats loaded to the gunwales with their 
cargo of human freight, were quickly lowered 
into the running sea. It required great seaman- 


50 JACK HEATON 

ship to do this and even then one or two of them 
were capsized. 

The Captain suddenly appeared before our 
window. 

^‘Boys, you have done your duty. Now save 
yourselves/’ and with that he was gone. 

I could feel her nose pointing up in the air and 
I knew she was going down stern-end on. It 
was only a question of minutes. 

‘‘Go on, Perce. I’ll stick here.” 

“Go on yourself,” he replied; “if any one 
stays I will. ’ ’ 

I don’t know exactly what happened but some- 
thing flying through the air must have hit me, 
for the next thing I knew I had struck the icy 
water and had gone down several fathoms. 
The sudden ducking revived me and when I 
came up I swam for an overcrowded life-boat. 
The bos’n pulled me in and a woman’s voice 
whispered, “Thank God, he’s saved!” 

There on the edge of the horizon I could see 
the dim outline of a ship with a great black 
stream of smoke in her wake and I knew her for 
the Arapahoe at last. 

“Where’s the little operator?” a man asked 


me. 


THE ANDALUSIAN 


51 


The bos ’n pointed to the fast sinking ship, the 
bow end only of which was out of the water, 
and said, There he is, sir!’’ 

And as we looked we saw big brave Captain 
Stacey and little heroic Terce with their right 
hands clasped and with the Captain ’s left hand 
on Perce’s shoulder, just as two old friends 
might greet each other on Broadway or the 
Strand, who had not met for a long time. 

An instant later the great ship sank from 
sight leaving a momentary whirlpool, due to 
the suction of it, in the water. 

The Arapahoe reached us an hour later and 
stood by and considering the heavy seaway and 
the wind, which though it had somewhat abated 
was still blowing half a gale, picked up the sur- 
vivors and then proceeded on her way. 

The passengers made a good deal over me 
and, since I am only human, I should have en- 
joyed their worship immensely, but while I had 
done my duty I knew it was Perce who was the 
real hero and I told them so. 


CHAPTEE IV 


CATCHING SEALS BY WIEELESS 

W HAT did I do when I got back, did yon 
say? Well, after the sinking qf the 
Andalusian my folks thought I ought to be will- 
ing to give up the sea and confine my adventures 
to Montclair, the Lackawanna Eailroad and 
New York, and they urged me to settle down and 
sell engines, or get into some other kind of busi- 
ness in the big town and commute like the rest 
of the suburbanites. 

I tried it for a few months but the air is dead 
on land and it stifies me like poison-gas when I 
breathe it, and besides, I kept hearing the call 
of the sea oftener and oftener and louder and 
louder just as though a spook mermaid were 
holding a conch shell to my ear. 

Well, sir, there were just no two ways about 
it. I was not cut out for a salesman but I could 
handle a key with the best of them. So one 
52 


CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS 53 

bright day — it was the first of March — when 
dad told me to go out and see a prospect who 
wanted a 40 horse-power crude oil engine, I 
made one stone kill two sparrows and after 
fencing with the would-be buyer for half an 
hour I slipped over to the Lord^s Court Building 
where the Marconi Company had their offices 
and talked with my friend Sammis, the Chief 
Engineer. 

‘‘No, there isn’t anything you’d want just 
now,” he reflected. “There’s a couple of new 
ships building in Belfast for the Cunard Line 
and one of them will be launched in a couple 
of months. I might be able to get a berth for 
you on her.” 

‘ ‘ I want to go right now if I go at all, ’ ’ I told 
him, for the land ached in my bones like the old 
Harry and I knew the only way I could get re- 
lief was to go to sea. 

“How would you like to go on a seal catch- 
ing expedition to the Arctic? It ought to be a 
pretty good health trip for an overworked sales- 
man. The Polar Bear and Midnight Sun sail 
in a couple of weeks from St. Johns, Newfound- 
land, to be gone for a month or so and the pay 
is double that of any operator in the trans- 


JACK HEATON 


54 

atlantic service. I have just shipped an op- 
erator named Mackey up there and gave him the 
post on the Midnight Sun so you’ll have com- 
pany, for they will sail together. If you’ll take 
it I’ll try to get you a good berth in the mean- 
time.” 

‘‘To the Arctic,” I ejaculated. “Well, Sam- 
mis, this is a voyage I ’ll have to sleep over, but 
it sounds good to me. I’ll let you know in the 
morning. ’ ’ 

There wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind 
but that I’d take it but I didn’t know exactly 
vhat my folks would say about it, for their idea 
was that they had had enough of my going to 
sea and they further thought that I ought now 
to be perfectly satisfied to stay on land for the 
rest of my natural life. 

Do you know that when I stepped out of the 
Lord^s Court Building after having signed up 
the next day I could feel the stone sidewalk 
rolling under me like the deck of a ship and 
that the putrid air of Wall Street smelled as if 
it had a dash of sea salt in it. That’s how great 
I felt. Dad would have to get some one else to 
sell his engines — it was the Arctic for me ! 

On arriving at St. Johns I at once hunted up 



WE WERE CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS J3 






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CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS 55 

Captain James of the Polar Bear and handed 
him my commission. And such a captain he 
was! He looked a ditferent race of seafaring 
men from the captains I had seen in the regular 
Atlantic service. 

His grizzled hair and heard and clear, keen 
eyes were gray; that part of his face which 
showed was about two shades lighter than the 
color of dried walrus meat and with his silence 
— except when any of the crew failed in his du- 
ties — you would have known, even if you’d met 
him on Broadway, that his home was somewhere 
inside the Arctic Circle. He turned me over 
to his first mate who also looked as if he had 
a heart of oak and would be equal to any duty 
he might be called on to perform if it was north 
of latitude 75 degrees, the latitude at St. Johns. 

Andy ohy the crew! They were cutters of the 
old school, every one of them. I had no idea 
that sailors of their kind were to be found any- 
where at this time here on earth except in song 
and story, but there they actually were all about 
me in the living flesh. There was an air about 
them that told as plainly as spoken words they 
had weathered many a polar storm and that 
now, even at St. Johns, they were way too far 


56 JACK HEATON 

south of the bleak, frozen regions to be in their 
element. 

And say, the ship! She was a beaut of the 
old wooden kind, not a whole lot to look at, but 
built to stand the strains of furious gales as 
well as the tremendous pressures of the ice 
packs. Indeed, she had been one of Com- 
mander Peary’s ships which had been farthest 
north when that explorer sought to find the 
North Pole some years before. 

The wireless apparatus and I were the only 
objects on the ship that seemed not to belong 
to her, but when we reached the sealing grounds 
we found ourselves and helped in the catch, 
thereby making friends with the Captain and 
his crew. 

The transmitter was formed of a single ten 
inch induction coil which was energized by a 
current of the ship’s dynamo. The receiver 
was of the regular Marconi type with a mag- 
netic detector. The masts of the Polar Bear 
were only fifty feet apart and an aerial made 
up of half-a-dozen wires swung between them. 

Whoever installed the equipment stopped at 
the aerial for there was no ground. It was no 
small job to get a decent ground for the ship. 


CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS 57 

as I have said before, was an old-timer and had 
a wooden hull. Now where a ship has a steel 
hull all you’ve got to do to make a ground is to 
simply connect the ground wire to a water pipe, 
or any other metal part of the ship, for these 
lead to the steel hull; as the hull sets in the 
water the very best kind of a ground is had 
without any trouble to get it. But what’s to 
be done when there’s nothing but an old-fash- 
ioned wooden hull between your instruments 
and the water! The way I did it was to run a 
wire from the instruments down to the engine 
room; then the assistant engineer fixed a 
6 X 6 X 24 inch block of wood parallel with and 
close to the propeller shaft; this done we 
screwed a copper brush, that is a strip of stiff 
sheet copper, to the block so that it pressed flat 
on and hard against the shaft. 

Under the head of one of the screws I looped 
the free end of my ground wire and screwed it 
down tight. This made a good enough ground 
connection through the shaft and the propeller 
keyed to it which was submerged in the water. 
With this transmitter, aerial and ground, I 
could cover 100 miles or so when the conditions 
were favorable. 


58 


JACK HEATON 


Everything was hustle and bustle on board 
and all around us, for at that time of the year 
— it was nearing the middle of March — a score 
or more of ships steam from St. Johns along 
the great Labrador Coast to the frozen north 
where the young harp seals are found by the 
thousands on the ice floes off the coast. 

Of all the ships at St. Johns I saw only one 
other that was fitted with an aerial and when 
I got my apparatus in order I made my way 
over to her to see Mackey, her operator. 

In days gone by the sealing ships were all 
schooners and just as these gave way to wooden 
steamers so the latter will be supplanted by 
ships with steel hulls, and the Midnight Sim 
was the first of these fine new steel craft. For 
size and power she put it all over the Polar 
Bear, but she lacked the glamor of romance and 
for this reason I liked my ship the best. 

I had met Mackey, her operator, at Liverpool 
once and we straightway became better ac- 
quainted. He told me that the firm who owned 
the Polar Bear also owned the Midnight Sun 
and that the Captains of them were to work 
together. A new experiment was to be tried, he 
said, and that was to catch seals by wireless. 


CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS 59 

but what the modus operandi of the scheme was 
he hadn’t the faintest idea and no more had I. 
I remember when I was a little boy that folks 
talked about running street cars by electricity 
and I wondered how it could be done. I had a 
kind of a vague notion that a chunk of electricity 
came along, struck the car and pushed it ahead 
just as a breeze fills the sails of a ship and car- 
ries her for’ard. 

In after years I learned that the current of 
electricity flowed along a wire parallel with 
the tracks and that it passed from this feeder 
to the trolley of a car, thence down a conductor 
to a motor which it energized and finally back 
to the power house through the rails; further 
that it was the power of the motor thus devel- 
oped which drove the wheels of the car; and I 
was disappointed, for it seemed to me to be al- 
together too round-about a way — too far- 
fetched — to justify the statement that the ‘‘car 
runs by electricity. ’ ’ 

The same thing holds good when you see signs 
which read, ''hats cleaned by electricity/' 
"eggs hatched by electricity" and "diamonds 
made by electricity/' for the hat is merely ro- 
tated by an electric motor, the eggs are hatched 


6o 


JACK HEATON 


in an incubator which is heated by a current 
flowing through a wire, and the diamonds are 
made in an electric furnace. 

Now catching seals by wireless was to my 
mind quite a vague, mysterious and altogether a 
difficult proposition to see into — even as running 
a car by electricity was when I was a little 
shaver. Seals are wonderful creatures, as you 
will admit if you ever saw them do a balancing 
act in a show, and I have heard that they have a 
great liking for music. A seal hunter can take a 
phonograph, put a band record on it, set it up 
where there is a patch of seals and start it go- 
ing. The seals will come out of the water to 
listen to the sweet strains and every time one 
puts its nose above the surface the hunter, who 
is lying a little way off, will shoot it with his 
rifle. This then is what you might call hunting 
seals with music. 

It looked to me as if we might be told to send 
out a line of wireless waves to a patch of seals, 
bend up the ends of a few dashes and when the 
seals had swallowed them the sailors would 
heave ho and pull them aboard. But no, catch- 
ing seals by wireless was not done in quite so 
direct a fashion, as you will presently see. 


CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS 6i 


We only made one stop after we left St. Johns 
and that was at Cartwright, near the mouth of 
the Hamilton River, on the bleak coast of 
Labrador. And wireless, let me say right here, 
has been a big factor in changing life, such as 
it is, in this wild, forbidding country. 

Labrador, you know, is a narrow strip of 
coastland along the edge of the province of 
Quebec. It is from 10 to 50 miles wide, but a 
thousand miles long, reaching from Belle Isle 
Strait which separates the lower end of it from 
Newfoundland to Hudson Strait which lies 
within the Arctic Circle. 

The inhabitants live only on the coast and 
these are made up chiefly of Eskimos in the 
north and Indians in the south, and all along 
and in between are trappers, fishermen and 
live yeres. The trappers push into the interior 
a little way to run their lines of traps and in 
the spring of the year thousands of fishermen 
come up from Newfoundland to take the cod- 
fish, which abound off the coast at this season 
of the year. If you ask one of the poor, ig- 
norant white inhabitants about himself he will 
say that he lives yere, hence the nick-name of 
this fixed part of the population. The condi- 


62 


JACK HEATON 


tion of all these poor, simple folk has been much 
improved by wireless. 

For many years the mail-boat was the only 
steamer that made calls at all the ports along 
the coast and she did this about every six 
months. If any one wanted to get something 
from St. Johns he had to know it a long way 
ahead of time and even when he was thoughtful 
enough to order it the chances are that by the 
time it reached him he had forgotten he had 
ordered it or had gotten over wanting it. 

On the mail-boat there was a doctor and the 
inhabitants had to wait to get sick until he 
came, or perhaps, it would be stating the case 
a little more accurately to say that however ill 
they might be they had to wait until he came 
before they could be treated. Anything might 
and often did happen to his patients between 
calls. But all this has been changed by wireless 
which now links up the towns along the coast 
with Battle Harbor where the Royal Deep Sea 
Mission has its hospital for fishermen, and not 
only may supplies be ordered but, what is of far 
greater importance, the sick may have their 
diseases diagnosed and medicine prescribed 
though they are as far away as Maine, by the 


CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS 63 

doctor in charge and all in the twinkling of an 
electric wave. 

As we steamed up the coast the ice fields be- 
gan to loom up and as far as the eye could reach 
they glittered and sparkled like gigantic jewels 
under the glare of the Arctic sun. When night 
came on and the stars came out they shone a 
hundred fold brighter than in the temperate 
zone and the pale blue moon illuminated the 
scene with a kind of a supernatural light that 
seemed not to belong to earth. 

But all the days and nights were by no means 
fine ones, for howling gales and fierce snow 
storms continually sprang up and I often won- 
dered how a ship built and sailed by the hands 
of men, could weather them out. It was a 
man’s work! On such occasions I stuck to my 
wireless room which I found mighty comfort- 
able and trusted to the Captain and his mates 
to see the ship safely through. 

As we got farther and farther north the 
Aurora borealis, or northern lights as it is 
called, grew brighter and brighter every night 
until the whole heavens in the region of the 
North Pole were scintillating with streamers 
that spread out like a great fan, reaching over 


64 JACK HEATON 

our heads and far to the south. The first mate 
said that it was as brilliant an aurora as he had 
ever seen and his explanation of it was that the 
spots on the sun had been unusually large and 
numerous. 

Not only did the sun’s activity show itself in 
the aurora, but it set up a violent magnetic 
storm on earth and this made the compass 
needles oscillate to and fro as much as 1% de- 
grees on each side of their normal positions. 
Now magnetic storms always interfere very 
seriously with the operation of both overland 
telegraph lines and cable systems where the 
circuit is completed through the earth. 

I had heard some one say, or had read some- 
where, that a magnetic storm would interfere 
in the same way with wireless messages and I 
was fearful for some time that it would put our 
signals out of commission. But all through 
the magnetic storm Mackey and I sent our 
messages without the slightest trouble — indeed 
if we had not been told that a magnetic storm 
was on we should never have guessed it. Evi- 
dently wireless had scored another point over 
the wire systems and another pet theory was 
put on the ice to cool. 


CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS 65 

We sailed up the coast keeping pretty close 
to it while the Midnight Sun steamed up and 
out from it until we were fifty or more miles 
apart. Now here is where wireless came in, 
in catching seals. Over the constantly broaden- 
ing gap between our ships Mackey and I kept 
their Captains right in touch with each other. 

The Captain of his ship wirelessed that there 
were any number of old seals about him and 
this showed, the first mate told me, that there 
were patches of white coats, as the young harp- 
seals are called, somewhere in the neighbor- 
hood. 

Our ship immediately headed in his direction 
and a night’s steaming brought us within a few 
miles of the Midnight Sun, but we did not see 
any white coats either. But after we scouted 
around for five or six hours we sighted a patch 
of hundreds upon hundreds of little seal babies 
basking on the ice floes in the sun. My Captain 
ordered me to signal the good news of our find 
to the Captain of the Midnight Sun; he in turn 
steamed at once for our ship and when she came 
up the killing began. 

These seals are called harp-seals because they 
have brownish yellow bodies and on the back of 


66 


JACK HEATON 


each one is a big black mark like a barp. The 
old harp-seals start from way up north of Mel- 
ville Sound in the early part of the winter and 
by March they are off the Labrador coast. 
There tens of thousands of them herd together 
on the drifting ice when the little white-coats, 
as the baby seals are called because their fur is 
so white, are bom and, curiously enough, nearly 
all of them are born on the same day. 

It was a great sight to see these fat roly-poly 
baby seals lying on their backs on the drifting 
ice and using their flippers to fan themselves 
with to keep cool. 

A few days later the ships were so close to 
each other that Mackey and I visited back and 
forth across the ice while the crews were busy 
taking the seals. When we headed for St. 
Johns we had on board our ship more than 
twenty-five thousand sealskins, which was as 
big a load as we could carry, while the Midnight 
Sun had nearly fifty thousand and together we 
broke all previous records. 

This being the case these hardened Arctic 
Captains were as tickled as a couple of sea- 
urchins and both agreed that wireless was the 


CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS 67 

greatest sealing scheme introduced since steam- 
ers took the place of schooners. 

Before we bore up for St. Johns there were 
great doings on board both ships. Rockets 
were fired in lieu of regular fireworks and 
Mackey, having the most powerful set, sent a 
message to old Boreas and old Arcticus who are 
pioneers in the refrigerating business, and if 
the North Pole has an aerial suspended from it 
and the latter has a receiver attached to it, I 
doubt not but that they listened-in to the first 
wireless signals ever sent within the polar cir- 
cle; if so, they heard some mighty tine things 
said about themselves and the glorious, though, 
withal frigid, country they rule over. 

I wouldn’t have missed that experience for a 
million dollars — what’s that? — well, not for a 
hundred dollars in real money anyway. 


CHAPTEE V 


MY ADVENTUKES IN THE TEOPICS 

W HEN Bert Mackey and I got back to 
New York we were both in the same 
boat — to wit, we were without jobs. On the 
way down, though, Bert unfolded a very allur- 
ing scheme by which we could, he allowed,, make 
oodles of money and at the same time stand a 
chance of meeting with something that looked 
like real adventure. 

‘^Do you know, Jack,’^ Bert said confiden- 
tially, ‘‘that I went into the wireless game 
simply because it appeared to me to offer the 
best chance of meeting Miss Adventure. IWe 
been at it for five years now and IVe never 
even had the pleasure of getting a look at her 
face. 

“Wherever I go she is always on the other 
side of the street and although I tip my hat to 
her she never looks up, much less gives me 
a tumble. I took that sealing job because 
68 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 69 

I certainly thought I^d meet Miss Adventure 
somewhere among the ice floes and blizzards of 
the Arctic North. But no ! all I did was to sit 
in my cabin and send what my Captain wanted 
to tell your Captain and receive what your Cap- 
tain had to say to my Captain. And to what 
purpose? So that a few rich men could get 
richer by enabling vain women to run around 
the streets of New York and a few other big 
burgs bedecked out in the skins of baby seals 
that had been clubbed to death. Now thaCs 
big business for men and women to be in, isn’t 
it? 

‘T wish I could get a job on a pirate ship or 
start a revolution in some punk Central Ameri- 
can country. And it ’s funny, ’ ’ he went on com- 
plainingly, ‘‘how a fellow like you, who has 
only been in the service a couple of years, could 
meet with a big adventure like the sinking of 
the Andalusian, I’d have given a year of my 
life to have been in your place. 

“Now down along the Amazon River there 
are great rubber plantations, savage tribes of 
Indians, tigers, monkeys, boa-constrictors and 
all the garnishings that go to make up a first 
class tropical jungle. I know a man in New 


JACK HEATON 


70 

York that does business with a rubber concern 
in Para, Brazil and he told me, just before we 
sailed north, that the Compagnie Francaise de 
TelegrapJiie sans Fil had a contract to put up 
half a dozen wireless stations along the river. 

^Ht strikes me. Jack, that it would be a good 
scheme if you and I took a trip down there and 
looked over the ground. What do you say ? 

Having a few dollars in my pocket and noth- 
ing else to do at that particular moment I said 
0 K and agreed to join him provided we could 
get free transportation on some liner going 
down there. Bert assured me that he could fix 
it and he was as good as his word. 

So it was we sailed in due time on the Gear a 
of the Holliday Line, It was an old tub that 
stood every chance of having on board Miss 
Adventure and I didn’t doubt in the least but 
that Bert would have ample opportunity to 
strike up an acquaintance with her and to swim 
back, if he got back at all, for the Gear a had no 
wireless equipment — such was her regard for 
the laws of the U. S. 

As luck would have it we had fine weather 
and she beat her way down just as she had for 
the last quarter of a century if she was as old 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 71 

as she looked. We enjoyed the trip, at that, 
for there were not many passengers aboard and 
all of them, especially the South Americans, 
were very pleasant people. Having learned 
that we had never been in South America we 
were told that it was a great country full of 
possibilities for young men with some capital 
but that if we were unacquainted there it would 
be better for us to about face at Para and go 
home. 

Bert and I had other thoughts on the sub- 
ject but as we were nearing the Equator I kind 
of wondered why I had not staid at home sell- 
ing crude-oil engines or taking the post on the 
new Cunarder that Sammis said he^d get for 
me, or doing something else that was nice and 
cool. 

In a little less than a month’s time we landed 
at Para, as it is popularly called, or Belem, 
as it is more properly called, or to give it its 
full name Santa Maria de Bel Belem do Para. 
Just as New Orleans is built back from the 
Gulf of Mexico, on the Mississippi River so 
Para is situated a hundred miles inland from 
the Atlantic on the Amazon River. So this is 
Para from which Para rubber comes, thought I 


72 


JACK HEATON 


as I looked about, and indeed I should have 
known it had I sailed into port with my eyes 
shut for the smell of rubber everywhere per- 
meated the air. 

But don’t think for a moment that it is made 
up of a lot of adobe houses as so many Mexican 
towns are. Far from it, for in architecture it 
is a miniature reproduction of Kio de Janeiro, 
which city in turn looks more like Paris than 
any other in either North or South America. 
Nor is Para a small burg, for it has a popula- 
tion of a hundred thousand now and some day, 
if the Amazon valley is ever developed, it may 
be larger than Eio de Janeiro, aye, even than 
New York itself. 

Different from the equatorial city I expected 
to find, where every one had nothing to do but 
to lie under a palm tree, look at the blue sky, 
smoke cigarettes and agitate the air with a fan, 
there was much to do, for there rubber is King, 
and the white, yellow and black folks were do- 
ing it with a good deal of vim too. The de- 
mand for rubber, we learned, was greater than 
it had ever been before and consequently the 
people were prosperous and happy. 

After a deal of searching we located the of- 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 73 

fices of the Compagnie Francaise de TelegrapJiie 
sans Fil and Bert explained to Sehor Benoit, 
the manager, that we were a conple of wireless 
operators from the United States. The man- 
ager acted as though he was dazed and Bert 
handed him our credentials to set him right. 

In a moment, though, he recovered and I wish 
you could have seen the way he greeted us! 
You’d have thought he’d found two long lost 
brothers for he hugged us in turn and almost 
wept on our necks. I thought the heat and the 
smell of the rubber had made him nutty where- 
as it was only his great good luck. Believe me, 
he knew exactly what it was all about. 

He had come on from France six months be- 
fore to put up a chain of wireless stations be- 
ginning at Para and on up the river for 2500 
miles to Equitos, at intervals of about 500 miles. 
Before the wireless men got to Jurutty they had 
been taken down with the fever and were even 
then on their way to Para, and so the job was 
open and ready for us to tackle. He agreed 
to pay us a million reis, including all our ex- 
penses and a million reis for every month we 
remained as operators in his company’s service. 
It didn’t take half-an-eye to see that if we 


JACK HEATON 


74 

could stick it out for a few montlis we’d be 
regular millionaires. 

want to make our wireless system a suc- 
cess to show the Brazilian capitalists its su- 
periority over the wire system. They have an 
overhead line stretched along the banks of the 
river but it gives very poor service for any one 
of a number of reasons, chief among them be- 
ing that it is hard to keep iron wires from rust- 
ing away owing to the great amount of rain, and 
when copper wire is used the Indians have a 
great liking for it and cut out a length here and 
there whenever they want it. 

“With wireless it is different and if I can only 
get the stations set up and working I will show 
the advantages of it over the wire system very 
quickly. Wireless will be safer and surer for 
the rains can ’t affect it and I am quite sure the 
Indians will not steal the ether.” 

We took passage on the Asuncion^ one of the 
Amazon Steamship Company's fleet of small 
steamers and sailed up the Eio Amazonia, or as 
we call it the Amazon Eiver, the mightiest of 
all flowing waters. On either side of it for hun- 
dreds of miles lay a tangled mass of tropical 
vegetation — the jungle in very truth. The vil- 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 75 

lages were far between but occasionally we saw 
the rude huts of a few settlers who had come 
forth from the civilized quarters of the world 
to sap out their energies and make their for- 
tunes in rubber. 

We were told that a mighty small area of the 
jungle had been explored though a few expedi- 
tions had made their devious ways through 
some parts of it either for scientific purposes, 
such as studying the vegetation and living 
things, or for commercial reasons as getting 
plants for medicines and more frequently rub- 
ber. 

And rain! I can’t remember a day down 
there when it didn’t rain. The reason it rains 
so much is this: the warm winds that blow 
up the river from the Atlantic carry a lot of 
moisture with them and the winds that blow 
down the river from the Andes are cold and 
when they come together, the moisture con- 
denses and it rains. 

The scenery looked about the same all the way 
along— just one mass of tropical trees of all 
kinds for the warp and these were woven to- 
gether with vines of every description for the 
woof. I could see our finish before we started 


JACK HEATON 


76 

in to ^Took over the ground’^ as Bert had sug- 
gested when we were in dear old New York. 
Yes, dear little old New York — how I wished I 
were back there again. 

As for rubber plantations they were there, the 
savage tribes of Indians were there too — I 
didn^t see them on the trip up stream but they 
were there all right just as Bert had said. 
There were no tigers as Bert guessed but we 
saw the onca, or jaguar (pronounced ja-gwar), 
a buff feline beast covered with black spots 
that is a second cousin to the tiger in both size 
and ferociousness. 

The whole blooming tribe of monkeys with 
faces on them that ought to make a fellow 
ashamed to look at himself in a glass, and make 
you know that Darwin was right ; boa-constric- 
tors and seven million, more or less of other 
kinds of snakes were there — in fact equatorial 
America was all that Bert, or I, or any one 
else, ever dreamed it was and then multiply it 
by about a hundred and you will get a faint im- 
pression of it. Yes, beasts, birds, fishes, snakes 
and insects end without number, and each a 
marvel of its kind, were there and so was the 
Indian princess. 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 77 

There was the tapir, a sort of a cross between 
a horse and a rhinocerous having a short pro- 
boscis as though its snout was made of rubber 
and some one had stretched it for him; it is a 
shy and harmless beastie that moves about 
chiefly at night. The sloth, a greenish-brown 
animal whose chief business it is to hang back 
downward from the branch of a tree and to 
sleep away its life. 

The ant-eater who picks up a living by eating 
ants and other insects. All hail to the ant- 
eater! IVe seen a dozen other animals down 
there that have no business outside of a jungle, 
or a zoo or a menagerie. Lizards are there in 
great variety from those that change their col- 
ors while you wait to those the natives serve up 
for you to eat. 

And talking about colors, no coal tar dye was 
ever discovered that could begin to equal the 
plumage of the birds down there. Large par- 
rots called macaws, parakeets, which are little 
parrots with long tails, cockatoos and love birds, 
which belong to the parrot family, and others 
on down to humming birds that are scarcely 
larger than wasps, are as thick as microbes in 
sour milk. 


JACK HEATON 


78 

But the jungle is the paradise of the insects ; 
there is every conceivable kind and then as 
many more that are beyond human belief: gi- 
gantic, gorgeous butterflies, beetles that looked 
as if they had been stencilled with the rainbow 
colors of the sun, and flies as numerous per 
square unit of space as grains of powder in the 
charge of an 8 gauge shell. 

The ants, though, have all the other insects 
faded and everything else in the jungle that 
lives on the ground. Next to William Hohen- 
zollern^s armies that devastated Belgium and 
Flanders rank the Amazon armies of ants that 
march out to seek what and whom they can 
devour. Everything from a jaguar on down 
that gets in their way becomes meat and drink 
for them. 

You have, of course, often watched our little 
(fireflies and wondered what kind of an appara- 
tus was installed in their anatomy which pro- 
duces the intermittent, phosphorescent light as 
they flit around. Well, down in Brazil there are 
fireflies that look like electric lights. They 
measure nearly 4 inches, long, and li/4 inches 
wide and carry three light reservoirs — two in 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 79 

the thorax and one in the abdomen — and these 
give off a bright greenish light. 

When the natives want a light they simply 
catch a few fireflies, put them in a bottle and 
cork it up. They could read by this light if 
they could read but they canT so the chief use 
to which they put the fire-fly lights is to hunt 
around in their beds to see what has crawled 
in with them. This, then, is the cheapest form 
of light and, according to Sir Oliver Lodge, if 
man could produce an electric light with as lit- 
tle expenditure of power as the fire-fly then a 
boy turning the handle of an electric machine 
could light up a good sized factory. 

The things that live in the Amazon River are 
just as plentiful as those that inhabit the jungle. 
The manatee, or sea-cow as it is called, is the 
largest having a length of something like 10 
feet. If you were far enough away from it 
you might mistake it for a seal for it has the 
same general outline. Turtles grow to be 3 feet 
long, and odds fish, there's enough different 
kinds to stock the seven seas and then have some 
left over for the boarding houses. 

I could talk to you for a week about the 


8o 


JACK HEATON 


strange living creatures I saw in and along 
the banks of the Amazon and in the jungle, but 
the trees and plants are just as wonderful. 
For instance, there are palms out of which palm- 
leaf fans are made and palm trees that grow 
up as high as wireless masts and on their main 
trucks and pennants are cocoanuts. Trees that 
when you tap ’em rubber, milk or cold water 
comes forth depending on the kind of a tree it 
happens to be. Also a large number of most 
uncommon fruits are there in great abundance. 

At last we arrived at our destination, Jurutty, 
a village about 500 miles east of Manaos. 
When we landed my first and only thought was 
of home and mother. My trip to the Arctic 
was a delightful little pleasure jaunt as against 
this one up the Amazon Eiver! Had I been 
castaway on the moon, aye, even on Mars, I 
couldn’t have felt more remote from my na- 
tive land than when I stepped ashore at Jurutty. 
And yet, would you believe it, now that it is 
in the past tense I would like to go there once 
again. 

We were met at the dock by Senor Castro, the 
fezendero, that is the owner of the fezenda, 
which means the plantation. He was a mixture 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 8i 


of Portuguese and Indian but none the less a 
gentleman for that. A motley crew of negroes, 
men, women and children with very little cloth- 
ing on and Indians who hadn ’t the remotest idea 
why any one should wear clothes at all, and mix- 
tures of these races, were also a.t hand to see 
the newcomers. 

Senor Castro was right glad to see us and 
after shaking hands with us half-a-dozen times 
he led the way back through a path in the jungle 
to his fezenda. We dined in his home as I 
had never dined before nor have since, drank 
coffee that threw the surpassing beverage of 
the same name which is brewed in Child’s and 
the Waldorf-Astoria in the shade and smoked 
his long tobacco wrapped cigarettes. 

Then we talked wireless. The apparatus, as 
Senor Benoit had said, was there and Senor 
Castro assured us that we should have all the 
help we needed to set it up. He told us that 
there was an electric generator and a crude-, 
oil engine to furnish the power to run it with 
— and yet there were hundreds of thousands of 
horse power to be had from the Amazon — 
but which had never been tapped. Fortunately 
I happened to know all about the history, theory 


82 


JACK HEATON 


and practise of oil engines and how to sell them 
if the alleged prospects had the slightest idea 
of buying such power units. 

Senor Castro also had a billiard table, a 
phonograph and other civilized inventions to 
while away life as pleasantly as possible in the 
jungle, and taking it all in all Bert and I con- 
sidered that things were not altogether against 
us. 

After we turned in our bobbinet curtained 
beds that night all went well until we were 
awakened in the small hours by the sound of a 
woman’s voice outside. Thinking it was some 
female in distress Bert awakened the fezendero 
only to be told with great courtesy that it was 
not a woman but an organ bird. Bert returned 
saying something about forming a Society for 
the Prevention of Jungle Noises at Night, and 
we slept again. 

In the morning Senor Castro took us out to 
show us his fezenda. Three small horses were 
saddled ready for us to ride — though I can 
ride a wave at sea much better than I can ride a 
quadruped on land. We rode around his rub- 
ber plantation and Senor Castro showed us how 
the rubber trees are tapped, explained that the 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 83 

fluid which comes from the trees is not the 
sap of the wood but of the bark and we saw how 
the natives stick little tin-cups to the trees with 
bits of clay to catch the fluid. 

On returning we rode along the edge of the 
jungle and Senor Castro cautioned us never 
to go into the jungle for you will either get 
lost, be killed by jaguars, bitten by snakes, or 
by fever laden insects which are just as bad.” 

‘‘To the south of us,” he went on calmly, 
“are the Caripunas — aboriginal Indians that 
kill and eat people if they get a chance. ’ ’ 

“Cannibals?” I asked to make sure I had 
heard aright, and when he said “yes” I could 
feel an electric oscillation run up and down my 
spinal column. 

“How far away from here are they?” ques- 
tioned Bert with a peculiar light in his eyes I 
had noticed whenever he spoke of adventure. 

“The village is about 200 kilometers from 
here, ’ ^ Senor Castro replied. “ It ^s strange but 
they seem to have some kind of a sixth sense 
by which they can tell the moment strangers 
arrive — some kind of a wireless telegraph sys- 
tem, I guess,” and he laughed. 

Then he went on: “I donT doubt but that 


JACK HEATON 


84 

they have been stalking us because you fellows 
are new to the place. ICs seldom that any of 
them ever come across this road because IVe 
put bullets into a couple of them and they won^t 
get away with any more of my rubber men on 
this side of the line.’’ 

I asked him if they had captured many of his 
men. 

Every time my men tread the jungle out- 
side of the fezenda they are taken unless they 
have an Indian guide with them. ’ ’ 

^^Oh, I see, they are Union savages,” said 
Bert and he added, ‘T know I’m going to like 
this place, Senor Castro.” 

In the days that followed we got right down 
to business for we wanted that million reis 
as soon as we could get it. We unpacked the 
materials for the aerial first and every move 
we made was watched with great interest by 
the villagers. The phosphor-bronze wire for 
the aerial seemed to have an especial attraction 
for them, for they would pick it up, look criti- 
cally at it and examine it as carefully as though 
they were looking for flaws in it. 

There were two palm trees at least 100 feet 
high and about 250 feet apart, and Bert and I 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 85 

decided to use these for the masts. When we 
had the aerial assembled with the leading-in 
wire soldered to it I asked if any one there 
could climb the palm tree and every man, 
woman and child said that they could. I gave 
one of the half-breeds a coil of quarter-inch 
hemp rope to hoist the aerial with and showed 
him how I wanted the end of the aerial made 
fast to the tree top and then told him to go 
aloft. 

I wish you could have seen that fellow climb 
the tree! I used to think our old time sailors 
were about as clever as they made ’em when it 
comes to climbing but there’s no use talking 
they’re too civilized — too far removed from the 
monkey family to know how to climb anything 
but a rope ladder. 

The half-breed grasped the back of the tree 
with the open palms of his hands and placing 
the bare soles of his feet in front like a jack- 
knife he just naturally walked up it. These 
same fellows can travel for miles through the 
jungle by swinging themselves from vine to 
vine and going as fast as you or I can walk. 
So you see there are some things an ignorant 
Amazonian can do that an educated New Yorker 


86 


JACK HEATON 


can^t do. And thus does Nature ^s law of com- 
pensation work out. 

After we got the aerial swung between the 
palms we set the engine and dynamo in place 
on their foundations and with some tinkering 
we got them to running pretty smoothly. To 
Sehor Castro’s delight we had enough current 
not only to work the wireless set but for lighting 
up his house as well. Last of all came the 
transmitter and receiver and although these 
were of French make we had no difficulty in 
either installing or operating them and it was a 
cinch to get either Manaos on the west or Al- 
meirir on the east. 

It seemed that the operators at both stations 
could get us a deal better than we could get 
them though all of the transmitters were fitted 
with one kilowatt transformers. But never 
mind, we had established communication, thus 
fulfilling our part of the agreement, and Senor 
Castro, by all the arts of a true gentleman, 
showed us how deeply he appreciated our work. 
Nothing was too good for us. The only flaw in 
the whole system was the operator at Manaos. 
He was like the sloth in that he was just as liable 
to go to sleep as he was to stay awake. 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 87 

I believe that every message I ever sent had 
something in it about rubber, whether the body 
of it related to the doctor, medicines, or what 
not, for along the Amazon River they live and 
die by that commodity. 

After we had been at Jurutty a few weeks 
Bert and I got so we knew the fezenda about as 
well as its owner did and we walked or rode 
about the place either alone or with Senor Cas- 
tro for we made it a point for one or the other 
to be on duty all the time and so make a reputa- 
tion for ourselves and for future United States 
operators who might happen that way. 

I often thought, in my rambles, that I could 
feel the presence of some human being back of 
a tree, or see a human shadow come and go 
before I could really make it out, but as this 
happened very often I came to believe it was 
merely a case of nerves. I talked with Bert 
about it and he said he frequently heard and 
saw things too but that there was nothing more 
to it than a snake or an animal moving about. 

Senor Castro, he said, ''has told us this 
little yarn about cannibals so that we would 
keep inside the fezenda. There used to be 
tribes of cannibals in the interior but all that 


88 


JACK HEATON 


sort of thing has been wiped out by the J esuit 
missionaries long ago.^^ 

I was out for a walk one morning not long 
after and I heard a monkey crying as though 
he was in great pain. I located him a dozen or 
twenty paces in the jungle and went after him. 
He seemed to have gotten tangled up in some 
vines and the harder he tried to get away the 
tighter they held him. 

Just as I reached up and released him a piece 
of wood was slipped into my mouth by some one 
from behind making it impossible for me to 
utter a sound and before I could take my revol- 
ver from its holster my hands were pinioned 
back of me and my feet were bound so that I 
couldn^t kick, much less run. Although I kept 
my eyes open I couldn’t see a man-jack of my 
captors nor did they make the slightest noise. 

They lifted me up bodily and after a few 
manoeuvers in penetrating the jungle we finally 
reached a pretty well trodden trail and then 
they set me down and took the gag out of my 
mouth. Four strapping big, copper colored 
bucks with splashes of red paint on their stark 
naked bodies were the imps of Satan who had 
so unceremoniously abducted me. I would 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 89 

have given just $7.00 in American gold to have 
gotten each one of them to hold on to the spark- 
gap of a 10-inch induction coil for just one 
second. 

They were a quartet of jim-dandies and all 
they needed was a stove-pipe hat apiece to com- 
plete their outfits. 

Again they boosted me into the air and with 
a savage at each corner of me they started otf 
on a dog-trot, whither I knew not but what I did 
know was that I was a goner. After a march, 
or a trot, of two days and nights we came to an 
Indian village. There were several hundred 
men, women and children savages about but 
they were dressed better than the hunters who 
had brought me in for each one wore a string 
around his or her waist and a rattle-box on her 
or his ankle. 

If any one thinks that cannibalism has been 
wiped out in the Amazon jungles he has another 
think coming for I saw with these — ^my own 
eyes — the whole horrible ceremony gone 
through with of eating human flesh. 

After I had been there a few days a couple of 
savages, one with brown hair and beard and 
the other with red hair and beard, began talking 


90 


JACK HEATON 


to me in Spanish after trying Portuguese on 
me. I was quite surprised when they told me 
they were rubber men from Sehor Castro 
fezenda whom the cannibals had captured 
nearly a year before. 

We planned escape by the hour, though one 
of them said that was just what these man eaters 
wanted us to do and that when a fellow tried to 
escape they would recapture him, bring him 
back, put him in the proverbial pot and let him 
stew in his own juice. We were of a mind 
that it would be better to be live men turned 
savages than to be cooked men eaten by canni- 
bals. 

His most high worshipful King Oopla re- 
lieved me of my revolver, and came nearly 
shooting up the village, — which I heartily 
wished he had done, — also my watch, knife, 
compass and other trinkets which four former 
articles he generously kept for himself and the 
latter he gave to a wench whom I afterwards 
learned was his daughter, the Princess Jaci — 
which is as near as I could come to pronouncing 
her name. I called her Princess Mabel, the 
latter name being that of a shine kitchen- 
mechanic we once had. 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 91 

Her face was thin and small and was topped 
by an enormons mass of frizzled hair while her 
eyes set at a slight angle so that you couldn’t 
just tell whether she was looking at you to the 
leeward or a rubber tree to the windward. 

Although her eyes were thus slightly out of 
alignment and her mouth was cut on much too 
large a scale, which gave her a hard look, she 
Avas always smiling good naturedly. 

The first thing I knew Princess Mabel began 
to hang around me and to eat and drink out of 
my cocoa-nut shell. She was an artistic crea- 
tion in olive drab, small, and lithe, but withal 
a very amiable and charming maiden as canni- 
bal maidens go. 

She hadn’t been spoiled by working in high- 
toned families in Montclair yet. I fought shy 
of her for some time for I thought they wanted 
to put up a job on me and that the moment I 
gave her a pleasant look I’d be on my way to 
the stew pot; this belief was further fixed in 
my mind by occasionally finding a skull, a rib, 
ulna, fibula, and other parts of the human skele- 
ton lying around loose. 

The rubber men, who could speak the Indian 
tongue a little, assured me, however, that the 


92 


JACK HEATON 


King had taken a great fancy to me — I suppose 
because I looked so young and tender — ^and that 
the Princess herself thought very well of me. 
The King^s idea, they informed me, was to have 
me marry the princess so as to improve the 
royal strain just as his own savage self had 
been improved in the slave days of South Am- 
erica when the niggers would run away from 
their masters and seek decent society among 
the cannibals. 

‘‘For heaven’s sake, boy,” one of the rubber 
men said to me, “make up your mind to marry 
her or we’ll all be served up a la chop suey in 
the grill room.” 

Henceforth I treated her with all the courtesy 
and dignity I could command and she recipro- 
cated by showing me where her papa kept my 
pistol, my watch and my compass — things I was 
glad to know, and she gave me these stones too, 
which I am told by dealers in gems in Maiden 
Lane to be diamonds. How much are they 
worth? No one knows until I have them cut. 

Everything went fine for the next couple of 
months but I was getting pretty sick of the life 
and kept scheming to get away. This tribe of 
savages used powerful bows and arrows barbed 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 93 

with bone and tipped with feathers. It was all 
I could do to bend them but the King had one 
made for me that was more to my strength and 
I learned to use it with precision and great 
effect. 

Every day I would go hunting and I always 
had the company of a couple of pleasant secret 
service savages. Whatever I bagged I gave 
King Oopla and Princess Mabel the very choic- 
est of it and I always tried to get game that was 
to their liking. We became great friends and 
I wouldn ’t leave these good simple minded peo- 
ple — no not for anything in the world unless I 
got a good chance. 

But I went a little farther every day and 
often lost myself from my savage guides, but, 
never fear, I always came back like a dutiful 
prospective son-in-law 'should. On returning 
one day from a hunting trip that had lasted 
longer than any of the others I had ever made, 
I found they had killed one of the rubber men 
and were cooking him en casserole. 

That evening at sundown the ceremonies 
began and when it had grown dark great bon- 
fires were lit and the cannibals, with hideous 
painted faces and bodies were dancing as if 


94 


JACK HEATON 


their very lives depended on it to the bombastic 
beating of tom-toms. Old King Oopla had on 
his dress suit which consisted of a pair of long 
horns projecting from either side of his head, a 
red undershirt, and a celluloid cutf on each 
ankle. Her royal highness, Princes'S Mabel, 
was bedecked out in a wonderful head-gear and 
a fluffy ballet skirt built up of macaw and other 
brilliant feathers. A few strings of human 
teeth around her neck completed her bridal cos- 
tume. She looked awful nice. 

The King, Mabel, and myself were squatting 
on a kind of throne built up in the center of the 
ring of dancers but so enthusiastic did these 
royal personages become that the King and the 
Princess must needs have a fling at it too. 

After keeping the dance going into the small 
hours of the morning they stopped and gorged 
themselves with human flesh until they fell 
down in their tracks, actually drunk with the 
gruesome orgy. It was a preliminary feast to 
my marriage with Princess Mabel. When at 
last the coast was clear I recovered not only 
my revolver but another one from the hole in 
the tree where the King hid his treasures and* 
giving it to Senor Paes, the surviving rubber 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 95 


man, we stole forth determined on gaining our 
freedom or else going to our deaths. 

At the end of every mile we covered I put 
my ear to the ground and listened in, but there 
were no sounds of our being followed. After 
ten hours’ travel over trails that I knew I 
figured that we were nearer Jurutty than to the 
cannibal village. We kept right on and after 
another five hours my ground telegraph told 
me that human footsteps were coming and I 
knew it was a question of only a little time until 
the savages would overtake us. 

When they were within arrow shot of us we 
each stood back of a tree on either side of the 
trail and as a squad of them came up unsus- 
pectingly we blazed away at them with our re- 
volvers and there were eight cannibal carcasses 
ready for the buzzards to pick. 

When we reached the fezenda Bert came 
near to giving the buzzards still more pick- 
ings, for he mistook my companion and myself, 
with our long, unkempt hair and bare bodies, as 
brown as those of Indians, for a precious pair 
of cannibals and he took a couple of pot-shots 
at us. 

After we had taken our baths and put on 


JACK HEATON 


96 

some honest-to-goodness clothes we had a long 
talk-fest. Sehor Castro, he said, believed that 
I had been devoured by jaguars, but he had 
somehow felt that I had been captured by the 
cannibals. He had searched into the depths of 
the jungle for some trace of me until he was 
taken down with the fever where he lay nigh 
unto death for a month. When he got well he 
concluded he^d go north for in the meantime 
Senor Castro had gotten another operator. 

^H^m certainly an unlucky dog. Jack,” Bert 
bemoaned his fate; ‘T can’t understand why I 
couldn’t have had even a look-in on that canni- 
bal business. Here I’ve been down with the 
fever while you’ve had as fine an adventure as 
ever befell a man. Back to Broadway for mine 
where the only cannibal princesses I shall ever 
see are those that trip the light fantastic in the 
chorus.” 

Truly, I’m sorry, old man,” I consoled him, 
^‘but it wasn’t my fault though it was your mis- 
fortune. You’ll get yours yet, so cheer up.” 

A week later we were ready to sail down the 
Amazon to Para, there to take ship for New - 
York. Senor Castro paid us the full amount 
agreed upon by the manager of the Compagnie 


ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS 97 

Francaise de TelegrapMe sans Fil and we had 
in all a total of about 4,000,000 reis between us 
— in fact we were, as we had anticipated, 
bloated millionaires. I had a satchel full of 
bills of big denomination — there is neither gold 
nor silver money down there. 

When we got to Para, though, and we began 
to spend our money we were astonished and dis- 
gusted to find that a meal cost about 6000 reis, 
the street-car fare was 400 reis and the postage 
on a letter home was 300 reis. In other words, 
a 1,000,000 reis was just about equivalent to 325 
dollars in our money. Well, we were million- 
aires while we thought we were anyhow. 

What about the diamonds I have? I don’t 
know but if they are the real thing I think I’ll 
organize a company, go down there with a ma- 
chine gun, wipe out the cannibals and open up 
a diamond field. 


CHAPTEE VI 


WOEKING WITH MARCONI 

1 MUST tell you about a fine experience I had 
with Mr. Marconi when he received the first 
signals across the Atlantic, but before I do so I 
want to say a few words concerning the great 
inventor and his wireless telegraph. 

Quite a number of people seem to be imbued 
with the idea that no one ever thought of send- 
ing messages by wireless before Mr. Marconi — 
in fact that he just put together a few old 
electrical instruments and forthwith sent and 
received messages over space without any con- 
necting wires. 

Of course the basis for these erroneous im- 
pressions is that Mr. Marconi is said to be, and 
rightly, the inventor of the wireless telegraph. 
Now I want to put those young fellows who are 
reading this account straight on the matter. 
Many men may work on a device and none of 
them hit upon the thing that is needed to make 
98 


WORKING WITH MARCONI 


99 

it practical; then some fine day a genius will 
happen along and see just what the device lacks 
and add it to the general collection, or he will, 
put something to it, perhaps accidentally, that 
does the business, and this last touch which en- 
ables it to be used gives the man who does it the 
right to be called its inventor. 

Now, dozens of men, including Morse, Edison 
and Tesla in this country, and Hughes, Pierce 
and Lodge in England, worked on the scheme 
of sending messages without wires; but they 
either experimented along the wrong line, or the 
few who worked on the right line did not push 
far enough ahead to get anywhere. The result 
was that by the time Mr. Marconi tackled it all 
the instruments that were needed for telegraph- 
ing without wires were at hand but no one had 
quite caught on how to use them. 

Nearly every one thinks, too, that it is far 
more wonderful to send wireless messages than 
it is to send messages over a wire ; but this is 
not the case at all, though both, I trow, are 
wonderful enough. When we say a message is 
sent by wireless we do not mean, by a long shot, 
that it goes from the place where it is sent to 
the place where it is received without anything 


100 


JACK HEATON 


between them to carry it. Nor again do we 
mean that it goes to a single receiver and no- 
where else. 

For instance, when you talk to a person ordi- 
narily you convey to him your message without 
wires, but it is the air between your mouth and 
his ear that carries the message, that is, waves 
are set up in the air and these are called sound 
waves. Naturally since the air is everywhere 
on the surface of the earth the sounds you make 
travel in every direction. 

A better example of wireless is a lighted 
lamp and your eye, for in this case the lighted 
lamp acts as a transmitter and sets up very 
short waves in the ether ^ which are called light 
waves and these likewise travel in every direc- 
tion. The ether is a substance that is 15 tril- 
lion times lighter than the air and it fills the 
whole universe, and when the electric waves set 
up by a light in it strike your eye the optic nerve 
carries the sensation of them to your brain and 
you see the light. 

The next thing to know is that light waves 
and wireless waves are exactly the same kind 
of waves, that is, both are caused by electric 
stresses and magnetic whirls in the ether, but 


WORKING WITH MARCONI loi 

while light waves are in the neighborhood of 
the ten-millionth of an inch in length, wireless 
waves are so long they make no impression at 
all on the eye. 

That light is electric waves in the ether has 
been known for the last couple of hundred years 
and later on scientific sharks believed there 
were other and longer electric waves but they 
didn T know how to produce them or to receive 
them until 1888. 

In that year Heinrich Hertz, a young German 
college professor, discovered that when an elec- 
tric spark was made by any kind of an appara- 
tus the positive and negative electric charges 
in uniting together would not only break down 
the air to make the spark, but would form an 
oscillating current, that is, a current which 
surges to and fro hundreds of thousands of 
times a second, and that this high frequency 
current, as it is called, sets up waves in the ether 
just as the vibrations of a bell set up waves in 
the air. 

Hertz made an apparatus by which he could 
produce electric waves of different lengths and 
this he called an oscillator. It consisted of a 
couple of wires fixed to the balls of the spark- 


102 


JACK HEATON 


gap of an induction coil, on the other and free 
end of which were soldered a couple of sheets of 
copper. (See the accompanying picture.) 



He also devised a simple apparatus to detect 
the presence of these waves — that is, to receive 
them, which he called a resonator, and this was 
a cut wire ring with a little brass ball on each 
of its ends as shown in the following diagram. 
Now when Hertz set his induction coil going, 
streams of sparks were set up in the spark-gap 
of the oscillator and electric oscillations, or 
high-frequency currents, surged from one of the 
copper plates to the other and back again, and 


WORKING WITH MARCONI 103 

these sent out trains of electric waves through 
the ether. 

By holding his resonator, or as we would 
call it now, his detector, at a little distance from 
his sending apparatus, when the latter sent out 
the electric waves they would set up electric 



oscillations, or currents of high frequency, in 
the ring detector and these in turn would make 
a stream of little sparks jump across the gap 
between the balls. 

Here, then, was a complete wireless sending 
and receiving apparatus, but it would work only 
a short distance, probably not over 100 feet. 
But Hertz was not trying to invent a wireless 
telegraph; all he wanted to and did do was to 
prove that there were long electric waves and 
there his work ended. 


104 


JACK HEATON 


After Hertz liad shown how long electric 
waves could be set up by the sparks of an in- 
duction coil, other scientific chaps went to work 
to get up a better scheme to detect them. In 
1890 Edouard Branly, of France, discovered 
that when metal filings were put in a tube and 



electric waves were allowed to fall on them the 
resistance of the filings was lowered, and Sir 
Oliver Lodge, in 1894, found that this was 
caused by the filings being drawn closer to- 
gether, that is, they cohered. By connecting a 
coherer (see the diagram) as he called the fil- 
ings detector, to a galvanometer and a dry-all 


WORKING WITH MARCONI 105 

lie was able to detect the presence of electric 
waves up to distances of 500 feet. • 

A year later Popotf, of Russia, made a re- 
ceiver for studying electric storms — lightning 
is only gigantic electric sparks — and this con- 
sisted of a coherer, a battery, a relay and an 
electric bell. Popotf connected one side of the 
coherer with a wire which he ran up into the 
air, or aerial wire as we call it now, and the 
other side of the coherer he grounded, as shown 
in the diagram. This was the first time that 



io6 JACK HEATON 

an aerial wire and a ground had ever been used 
in connection with a coherer. With this ap- 
paratus Popoff was able to hear the coming of 
storms for hours before they appeared above 
the horizon. 

About this time Gugliemo Marconi, who 
was only 20 years old, was going to the Uni- 
versity at Bologna, Italy. Prof. Eighi who 
lectured on physics there was repeating Hertz ’s 
experiments and used Branly^s coherer for de- 
tecting the electric waves. This set Marconi 
to thinking and it was not long before he had an 
experimental wireless set of his own, thus be- 
coming the first wireless hid. 

The chief difference between his transmitter 
and that of Hertz was a telegraph key which 
he put in the battery circuit so that he could 
break up the sparks into dots and dashes. He 
also set a reflector back of the apparatus to 
concentrate the electric waves into 'a beam to 
make them go in a given direction when they 
would be more powerful and cover a longer dis- 
tance. But Hertz did the reflector stunt first. ^ 

Marconi’s receiver was made up of an ap- 
paratus just like Popoff ’s except that he 'con- 
nected an old-time Morse printing register in 


WORKING WITH MARCONI 107 

the battery circuit so that when the electric 
waves acted on the coherer the signals would 
be printed on a tape in dots and dashes. 

In his first attempts, then, to send wireless 
messages, young Marconi had done four things 
and these were (1) to see the possibilities of 
using electric waves s'et up by a Hertz appara- 
tus for sending mess’ages ; (2) to put a telegraph 
key in the sending circuit; (3) to use a Popolf 
receiver for receiving the electric waves, and 
(4) to put a Morse register in the receiving 
circuit. These were the first big steps in 
building up a wireless telegraph set, but none 
of them formed an invention. 

I do not know just when Marconi added the 
aerial and ground to his transmitter — Popoff 
had used an aerial and ground with his receiver 
— but the aerial and ground formed his great 
claim to being the inventor of the wireless tele- 
graph, for it was the aerial and ground which 
enabled him to cover long distances. 

In 1896 Marconi went to England and there 
applied for a patent in which he showed an 
aerial and ground connected to his sending and 
receiving apparatus (see the diagram) but even 
at this time he did not understand the impor- 


io8 JACK HEATON 

tance of a high, well insulated aerial and a good 
ground. 

On arriving in London this boy, with the big 
idea in the back of his head and a lot of business 
ability in front of it, went to Sir William Pierce, 



who was then at the head of the British Post 
Office and offered to give him a demonstration 
of his new wireless telegraph. As Sir William 
had long been interested in the possibility of 
wireless telegraphy he was agreeable. The 


WORKING WITH MARCONI 109 

outcome of it was that one station was rigged 
up in the General Post Office and another on the 
Thames embankment about 300 feet away. 

These experiments were successful enough to 
interest the War Office and he was asked to 
show what he could do over longer distances. 
Salisbury Plain was chosen for the trials and 
by placing reflectors back of the sending and 
receiving apparatus he was able to telegraph 
over a distance of about 2 miles. 

Marconi now commenced to experiment with 
aerials and grounds in order to increase the 
effective range of his apparatus and with them 
he was able to cover the distance of 3 miles be- 
tween Lowernock and Flat Holm. Sometimes 
in these trials the dots and dashes would be 
printed good and clear and at others they were 
all jumbled up. 

The inventor was trying all sorts of schemes 
to get satisfactory results, but nothing helped 
until he heightened the aerial wire on his send- 
ing apparatus. Presto ! the signals came in 
clear and without a miss. Here then was the 
whole secret of wireless telegraphy — the higher 
the aerial the farther messages could be sent 
with the same amount of power. 


110 


JACK HEATON 


This was the real beginning of wireless teleg- 
raphy and from that moment on Marconi’s star 
began to rise. It was not long before he was 
telegraphing over a space of eight miles, the 
aerials at both ends being held up in the air by 
kites. 

These astounding results had reached the 
ears of German scientists and through the pull 
of the former German Emperor, now plain Mr. 
Hohenzollern, things were fixed so that Dr. 
Adolph Slaby, of the Charlottenburg Univer- 
sity, was allowed to be present while Marconi 
was sending and receiving messages. 

The learned doctor deliberately swiped Mar- 
coni’s ideas and on returning to the land of hul- 
tur he bent his energies toward outdoing and 
undoing the young inventor who showed him 
how to telegraph without wires. Of course. 
Dr. Slaby invented a system of wireless teleg- 
raphy and this was quickly used on the ships 
of what was formerly the German Navy. 

But Marconi’s fame as the real inventor of 
the wireless telegraph had too sound a bottom 
for his detractors to hurt him much and he went 
right on about his work without the slightest 
caring whatever. He was next invited by the 


WORKING WITH MARCONI in 


King of Italy to visit his native land and to 
make some experiments there. A shore sta- 
tion had been put np at Spezia and a couple 
of war ships were fitted with wireless equip- 
ments. In the tests which followed Marconi 
broke the record for wireless and his achieve- 
ment was the talk of the world. 

Wireless, like its inventor, was on the up- 
grade and in England MarconVs Wireless Te~ 
legraphy Company, Limited, as it was at first 
called, was organized for the purpose of in- 
stalling his system on ship and shore stations. 
Stations at Bournemouth and at Alum Bay on 
the Isle of Wight, about 14 miles apart were 
put up and Marconi did a great deal of experi- 
menting and increased his range to 18 miles 
when he sent to and received messages from an 
out-bound steamer. 

No one could shut his eyes to the value of 
wireless at sea and Lloyd^s, the great shipping 
corporation, had two stations put up at Bally- 
castle and Rathlin Island on the northern coast 
of Ireland where experiments were conducted 
to further test the reliability of the system in 
all weathers. 

The Kingston Regatta was the next event 


112 


JACK HEATON 


in whicli wireless figured and the Daily Express 
of Dublin arranged with Marconi, or his com- 
pany, to install his apparatus on a ship and re- 
port the races to the shore station for the ben- 
efit of their readers ; and this was done without 
a hitch. Talk about a scoop! Here was a 
wireless scoop. Can you beat it ! 

About this time the Prince of Wales, after- 
ward King Edward VII, met with an accident 
and he went aboard the royal yacht Osborne to 
recuperate. Could Marconi fit up a station on 
it and also in the royal residence Osborne where 
Queen Victoria was staying so that communica- 
tion might be kept up between them? Of 
course he could and he did it with much satis- 
faction and pleasure to his royal patrons and 
credit to himself. 

The next installations of note were made by 
the Marconi Company at South Foreland Light- 
house and East Goodwin Lightship which lay 
off the Goodwin Shoals about a dozen miles 
away. This was in December, 1898, and very 
shortly after a steamer was stranded on the 
shoals. A C Q D signal was instantly flashed 
from the lightship to the lighthouse and 
brought help that saved the ship with its cargo 


WORKING WITH MARCONI 113 

which together were worth a quarter of a mil- 
lion dollars. 

Bigger things were now in order and greater 
distances were to be spanned. Early in 1899 
Marconi set up a station at Dover on the Eng- 
lish coast and another at Wimereaux on the 
French coast. The distance between these sta- 
tions was 30 miles but Marconi had no trouble 
in sending messages forth and back across the 
English Channel. 

This astounding feat made the British Ad- 
miralty sit up and scan the horizon and seeing 
wireless writ large upon it, it had Marconi put 
his outfits on three cruisers that very year. 
During the naval manoeuvers which soon took 
place wireless as a factor in fighting was given 
a thorough tryout with the result that the top- 
notch distance was reached when the flagship 
of the fleet signaled orders to one of the cruis- 
ers at a distance of 85 miles. 

I remember distinctly how every one over 
here was talking about that wonderful wireless 
and the boy who invented it. Consequently 
when the New York Herald announced that it 
had engaged Marconi to report the Interna- 
tional Yacht Race at New York, the one word 


114 


JACK HEATON 


on everybody's tongue was wireless, A ship 
fitted with wireless that followed in the wake 
of the yacht, and a shore station was used as in 
the Kingston Regatta, Over 4,000 words were 
transmitted from the wireless ship to the shore 
station where they were retransmitted by wire 
to the Herald office in New York. 

The Marconi interests got busy on this side 
of the hig wet and organized a company to 
carry on the business over here. Stations 
were put up in 1901 at different points on the 
Atlantic coast and also in England. The 
British Marconi Company entered into an agree- 
ment with Lloyd’s in which the latter agreed to 
use only the Marconi system for a term of 14 
years and that ships fitted with Marconi ap- 
paratus should not exchange messages with 
ships carrying any other make of apparatus. 
Then began the great business of installing 
Marconi apparatus on the fleets of transatlan- 
tic shipping routes. Still Marconi wasn’t sat- 
isfied ; he wanted to and did do bigger things. 

I hadn’t been home from South America 
more than a fortnight when it just so happened 
that I listened-in (without a receiver and quite 
unintentionally I assure you) to a conversation 


WORKING WITH MARCONI 115 

between two officials of a certain wireless com- 
pany. The message I got was that Marconi 
was on his way to St. Johns, Newfoundland, 
with a couple of assistants and that his purpose 
was to find out how far he could receive mes- 
sages from passing steamers. 

My subconscious self immediately wirelessed 
to my conscious self that it would be a fitting 
piece of business for me to work under the 
great inventor — though he was not much older 
than I. I knew perfectly well that there was 
no use trying to get a job with him through the 
ordinary channels for he had brought his own 
assistants from England with him and, of 
course, none others were wanted. 

Therefore, I said nothing to any one but 
quietly hopped on a train for St. Johns, and 
trusted to luck for the rest. Did you ever 
notice, Mr. Collins, that when you make up your 
mind to do a certain thing and you try as hard 
as you can to do it, good luck generally meets 
you somewhere along the road and gives you a 
lift? 

Well, when I got to St. Johns, it was the 3rd 
of December, 1901. I went into a second hand 
store and bought an outfit of clothes so that I 


JACK HEATON 


116 

would look like the rest of the working people 
,up there; and when I put them on I flattered 
myself that I did ; my face and hands tanned in 
the tropics helping out quite some, 

I learned that Marconi and his assistants had 
not arrived nor had any one heard that they 
were to come. I figured it out that their coming 
was either a secret or a hoax — ^in fact, I was in- 
clined to the latter belief ; and I had great fears 
I was on a wild-goose chase and that I had spent 
about half a million of my hard-earned Brazil- 
ian reis for nothing. I stuck around though, 
and on the 6th who should come to town but the 
inventor of the wireless telegraph, though to 
look at him you would not have suspected it. 
I did not make known to his assistants that I 
was an operator but when the boxes and hamper 
which contained his instruments were unloaded 
I jumped in and helped to put them on the 
wagon. 

Mr. Marconi — ^now that I had seen him he 
was Mr. — and one of his assistants left and 
the other remained behind to look after the 
bags and baggage. He thought I was the 
helper of the driver of the dray and the driver 
thought I was one of the assistants — or at least 


WORKING WITH MARCONI 117 

that^s what I thought they thought. At any 
rate when we got the dray loaded I just nat- 
urally jumped on and went with them. 

Mr. Kemp, the assistant, instructed ’the 
driver to go to Signal Hill, which is about half- 
a-mile from St. Johns and right at the mouth of 
the harbor. When we got there I was nearly 
frozen but I buckled right down and helped 
the drayman to unload the stuff and to carry it 
into the barracks. When he had been paid and 
was ready to go I said to the driver, guess 
Idl stay and help around,’’ and when he said 
‘^all right,” I knew that matters were pretty 
well fixed. From that time on I made my- 
self generally useful as a first class rousta- 
bout. 

While Mr. Kemp and I were busy unpacking 
the apparatus, kites and balloons, Mr. Marconi 
and Mr. Paget came in. The inventor wore a 
fur cap and a fur trimmed overcoat. He took 
these off, just like a common everyday man, and 
stood by for a moment looking on. He didn’t 
say anything and you can bet your last Bra- 
zilian reis that I kept my mouth shut. Now 
and then, though, I took a good look at him for 
he was, indeed, no lesser personage than the 


ii8 


JACK HEATON 


great inventor of the wireless telegraph — Gng- 
liemo Marconi ! 

He was then 27 years old but he looked at 
least ten years older. His father was an 
Italian and his mother was Irish, but Mr. Mar- 
coni, except for his bluish eyes and rather light 
hair, looked strictly like a son of sunny Italy. 
He had a high forehead, long and rather thin 
nose, largish ears, a big mouth with a long 
upper lip which was covered with a straggly 
mustache, a strong chin and deep-set, serious 
eyes that seemed to be looking beyond whatever 
he was looking at. 

Certainly he was not an inventor of the old 
school for he was well groomed and dressed in 
an up-to-date business suit. One thing sure he 
was not much of a talker and I soon observed 
that his great part in the game of wireless was 
a thinking part. 

His assistants set up a little apparatus which 
consisted of a receiver only with a telephone 
receiver hooked up to it instead of the usual 
Morse register. The aerial wire was led out- 
side through a hard rubber insulator in the win- 
dow where it was fixed to but insulated from a 
stout pole, set in the ground. To the free end 


WORKING WITH MARCONI 119 

of this leading in wire the aerial wire proper, 
when it was held aloft by a kite or a balloon, 
was to be secured. 

As his assistants — Mr. Marconi always ad- 
dressed them as Mr. Kemp and Mr. Paget — 
were connecting up the instruments there was 
small show of emotion though I could feel the 
high tension they were under and shared it 
with them. Finally the apparatus was con- 
nected up and Mr. Marconi tested out the ad- 
justments. 

Next we got out several big, nine-foot, hexa- 
gon-shaped kites whose ribs were of bamboo 
and which were covered with silk soaked in 
dope to make it waterproof. These we put to- 
gether and then from the wicker hamper we 
took a couple of small silk balloons and filled 
them with hydrogen gas from cylindrical steel 
tanks in which it was compressed. 

At last on Tuesday, December 9th, we were 
all ready to hoist the aerial wire with either a 
kite or a balloon, but the wind was still high and 
a small blizzard was on. Mr. Marconi did not 
think it advisable to try to make any tests then, 
and if we were disappointed what must he have 
been. The next day the wind was still blowing 


120 


JACK HEATON 


strong but we were all anxious to get to work. 

‘‘You may try putting up a kite when you are 
ready, Mr. Kemp,^^ Mr. Marconi said. 

Mr. Kemp was soon ready and with the help 
of a couple of natives — I was one of them — he 
got the kite aloft. We used a stranded copper 
wire for the kite string and this was also to 
serve for the aerial, but the moment we had it 
well up a gust of wind hit the kite, the wire 
parted and — ^we were ready to try again. 

Mr. Marconi then suggested that we try one 
of the balloons. We took it outside, fastened 
the aerial wire to it and, different from the 
kite, we had no trouble in getting it to go up. 
No sooner had we let out all the wire than it 
snapped again and the balloon sailed out to sea. 

The next day the wind was just as high but 
we stuck to the barracks in case it should go 
down. There were bits of talk among Mr. Mar- 
coni and his assistants about the instruments, 
the ground, the aerial and other things which 
would have been as Greek to any one but an old 
operator like myself. I drank in every word 
that these pioneer wireless men said but never 
a word said I. Once Mr. Paget asked me to 
hand him a dry-cell and I handed him a binding 


WORKING WITH MARCONI 121 


post instead. Some one said stupid'' under 
his breath but still loud enough for me to hear 
it and I was happy. None of this wireless Ud 
stuff here. I was getting away with murder. 

Mr. Paget looked at his watch. ‘‘Poldhu is 
sending now. Too bad we haven T a kite up, 
Mr. Marconi.’^ 

‘‘We must get it up. Mr. Kemp, will you be 
good enough to try again P’ Mr. Marconi said. 

Oh-ho, said I to myself. I am in on big 
doings. What Mr. Marconi is here for is not 
particularly to get signals from passing ships 
far out at sea, but to try and get Poldhu! It 
made my hair stand on end at the thought of 
such wonders. And if he gets it he will have 
spanned the Atlantic — over 2,000 miles — with 
his wireless waves. He will have done the big- 
gest scientific thing since Cyrus Field joined 
the old and the new worlds with his cable! 
Whoopee! Yow! Yow! 

From that moment on I was walking on air. 
The inventor, whatever he may have felt, was 
calm, cool and collected, dignified at all times 
but always in a good humor. The strain he 
was undergoing must have been tremendous, 
but he had trained himself well in the art of 


122 


JACK HEATON 


restraint and no one, not in on the know would 
have ever suspected it. 

At Poldhu, on the Cornish coast of England, 
the Marconi Company had built, for the express 
purpose of making this greatest of all experi- 
ments, the most powerful wireless station that 
had yet been put up. It had been figured by 
Marconi and his technical adviser of England, 
Dr. Fleming, that to transmit wireless mes- 
sages across the ocean, 15 vertical wires 210 
feet high, would have to be used and that these 
would have to be energized by oscillating cur- 
rents equal to about 25 horse power. It was in- 
deed a veritable lightning and thunder plant ! 

On Thursday, the 12th of December, we fiew 
another kite and Mr. Marconi came out and 
personally saw to it that no flukes were made. 
The wind was still high and fitful, but with ex- 
treme care in which all of us, including Mr. 
Marconi, took a hand we somehow got it up 
and held it at about 400 feet. 

Then the inventor and Mr. Kemp went into 
the wireless room. This was about 11 :30 
o’clock in the morning, St. Johns time. We 
held the kite as steady as we could and I knew 
that the supreme time in Marconi’s life was at 


WORKING WITH MARCONI 123 

hand. After waiting half an hour — it seemed 
like an eternity of time even to me — Mr. Kemp 
came out of the barracks and hurried over to 
where we were holding the kite. I couldn’t tell 
from his face whether the experiment had been 
a success or not, for an Englishman’s face al- 
ways looks the same. 

‘‘We got it!” he told Mr. Paget. “Mr. Mar- 
coni got the signal first and then handed the 
head-phone to me. I heard the three dots sev- 
eral times in succession quite clearly.” 

The three dots forming the letter S were 
those agreed upon by Mr. Marconi and his op- 
erators at the Poldhu station before he left 
England, as being the best signal to send out. 

“Fine, old top,” exclaimed Mr. Paget, or 
words to that effect. 

Mr. Kemp then went back to the barracks 
and in another half hour he emerged again and 
told Mr. Paget that the signals were still com- 
ing in and that there wasn’t the slightest doubt 
but that they came from Poldhu. He said that 
Mr. Marconi had asked that the kite be kept up 
for another hour if possible. 

The wind grew more blustery than before, 
but anything was possible now for nothing so 


JACK HEATON 


124 

makes for success as a little success. The 
aerial was often more nearly horizontal than 
vertical, but Mr. Marconi got the signals as 
they were flashed out by Poldhu just the same. 
This ended our work for the day — that never- 
to-be-forgotten 12th of December. 

The next day we flew the big kite using the 
aerial wire for a string again, for Poldhu had 
been instructed to keep on sending the letter S. 
The three short dots were sent out right along 
with short intervals between them, but the kite 
would take a header every time it was hit by a 
gust of wind and this would bring the aerial 
wire down so low the signals could not be heard, 
and, again, the receiver had to be kept in close 
adjustment. 

After these last tests we hauled in the kite 
and then came the soft job of packing up the 
stuff. While we were doing this I threw a 
bomb into Mr. Marconi’s camp by telling Mr. 
Paget that I was Jack Heaton, the former chief 
wireless officer on the Andalusian, He told 
Mr. Kemp and they both smiled. 

Well, bless my heart, old man,” he said with 
about as much show of emotion as I do now in 
repeating it to you. rather thought, don’t 


WORKING WITH MARCONI 125 

you know, that you were as smart as paint — 
too smart to be trundling boxes around on a 
bally goods wagon. Who told you to come up 
hereT’ 

‘‘No one, Mr. Kemp, I just wanted to work 
under Mr. Marconi so that I could say I had 
done so and I came up from New York of my 
own accord.’’ 

“Well, bless my old soul!” Mr. Kemp con- 
tinued, which was his way of expressing his 
opinion of the nerve I had shown. 

I kept right on packing up the stuff under the 
direction of the two assistants and after a while 
when Mr. Marconi came over Mr. Kemp spoke 
to him. 

“I say, Mr. Marconi, this chap is Jack Hea- 
ton who was the operator on the Andalusian 
when she went down. He says he came up 
here to work with you. I don’t know who took 
him on ; I didn’t and Mr. Paget says he didn’t.” 

“Mr. Marconi, I’m mighty glad to meet you,” 
I said and held out my hand. 

He grasped it firmly and shook it just once 
and that was worth another million dollars. 
What’s that? Well, it was worth a hundred 
anyhow. 


126 


JACK HEATON 


Extraordinary,’^ said the great inventor as 
though this big word had but two syllables in 
it. extraordinary. I hope, Mr. Heaton, 

you have not been disappointed.” 

not only deeply appreciate the fact that I 
have been one of your assistants, sir, but to 
have been present when you received the first 
cableless signals across the Atlantic was an 
honor I never dreamed of.” 

With his usual deliberateness the inventor 
did not immediately give to the world at large 
the wonderful results of his transatlantic ex- 
periments but waited for two whole days after 
he had completed his tests. When he did finally 
make them known there was quite a conflict of 
opinion, for some believed and others doubted 
that he had actually received the signals from 
Poldhu. 

Many of those who had followed wireless te- 
legraphy from its beginnings and knew some- 
what of the theory of how it worked, set up a 
hue and a cry that the signals he had received 
were sent by ships at sea, or else they were due 
to static f as we call it now, that is, little charges 
of atmospheric electricity which accumulates 
on the aerial wire and finally discharges through 


WORKING WITH MARCONI 127 

the detector into the ground and this makes a 
click in the head-phones that sounds like a dot. 

When the equipment was packed up Mr. 
Kemp paid me off— not at the measly rate of a 
truck driver or a roustabout in St. Johns, but 
an amount considerably over that which a first- 
class operator gets and my expenses for a 
round-voyage beside. I was soon headed once 
more for New York. 

During the next two months Mr. Marconi ^s 
critics were still carping about the cableless 
signals. And then the inventor put a big one 
over on them that made them crawl into their 
holes. In February, 1902, the s. s. Philadelphia 
sailed from England with the inventor on board. 
The wireless receiver was of the regulation 
ship and shore type, that is, it had a coherer 
and a Morse register, and it was nowhere nearly 
as sensitive as the detector and telephone re- 
ceivers used in the Poldhu tests. 

Mr. Marconi had arranged for the station at 
Poldhu to send messages every day at certain 
times until the Philadelphia arrived at New 
York. He adjusted the ship^s receiver himself 
and from the time she left England messages 
sent from the Poldhu station were printed on 


128 


JACK HEATON 


the tape until the ship was 1,551 miles out and 
from that time on signals were recorded on the 
tape up to 2,099 miles. 

This time there was no possible chance for 
the doubting Thomases to say that there might 
have been an error, for there were the records 
printed in ink on a tape and not only Mr. Mar- 
coni but the officers of the ship saw them, and 
the tape at different times was signed by the 
Captain. Thus the last one read: 

“Eeceived on s. s. Philadelphia , Latitude 
42, 1 N., Longitude 47, 23 W., distance 2,099 
(two thousand and ninety-nine) statute miles 
from Poldhu. Capt. A. E. Mills. 

This then was the beginning of sending mes- 
sages across the ocean without wires, or cable- 
less telegraphy, as you call it, and I was in on it. 


CHAPTER VII 


A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR AT ARLINGTON 

N early every one has the idea, or mania, 
or whatever you call it, of making some 
kind of a collection. It often begins to show 
itself early in a fellow’s life, and I’ve seen 
some old codgers in which it was still going 
strong at seventy. 

For instance, when I was only 10 or 12 years 
old I began to collect postage stamps; mother 
started to collect trading stamps as soon as 
they were invented; dad has a wonderful col- 
lection of old carbureters, which ill-fated mo- 
torists had thrown away, and Messrs. Carnegie 
and Rockefeller are still collecting the coin of 
the realm. 

The pet collections of the ladies of my home 
town consisted chiefly of souvenir spoons, china, 
pewter-ware and cut-glass while the men col- 
lected autographs and books, bugs and butter- 
flies, antiques and paintings, fishing tackle and 
129 


130 


JACK HEATON 


sporting guns. Then there was a sad-eyed 
young man whose parents were poor, but dis- 
honest, who got a notion he would make a col- 
lection of all the solid silver water pitchers in 
and adjacent to Montclair, but the police made 
him to part with his novel collection and for the 
next five years he had ample time to collect his 
scattered wits. 

A few years after I had been with Mr. Mar- 
coni at St. Johns, when he received the first 
signals fiashed across the Atlantic, his and other 
companies and various governments began to 
put up and to operate gigantic cableless sta- 
tions. It came to me that it would be a nice 
thing to make a collection of all these big wire- 
less plants. In thinking it over, though, I had 
to admit there were a couple of obstacles in the 
way which would make it a mighty hard propo- 
sition to carry through — and these were: (1) 
I couldn’t get them all in our back-yard in 
Montclair, and (2) I didn’t have the ready 
money to buy them. 

The next best plan, I pictured in my mind’s 
eye, would be to make a two foot scale model 
of each one of them and arrange them in a 
double row like the mummies in the Metropoli- 


A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR 131 

tan Art Museum. As this scheme too, I figured, 
would take much time and money I compromised 
the matter by promising myself that I would 
visit each station in turn as they were put up 
and then in the end, I’d have a mental collection 
of them and this, at least, wouldn’t take up any 
room nor would it cost very much. 

After Marconi had received messages up to 
1,551 miles and signals up to 2,099 miles at 
sea on a Morse register from his experimental 
station at Poldhu the future of cableless teleg- 
raphy was an assured fact. 

In 1902 stations of much greater power were 
put up at Poldhu, England, and at Glace Bay 
on the Newfoundland Coast and at Wellfleet, 
Mass. When the latter station was far enough 
along so that messages could be sent. Colonel 
Roosevelt, who was then President of the United 
States was asked to send King Edward VII the 
first cahleless message across the Atlantic. It 
read: 

“His Majesty Edward VII, London, England. In 
taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scien- 
tific research and ingenuity which has been achieved 
in perfecting a system of wireless telegraphy I extend 
on behalf of the American people most cordial greet- 


132 


JACK HEATON 


ings and good wishes to you and all the people of 
the British Empire. Theodore Roosevelt, Wellfleet, 
Mass.’’ 

As the new station at Poldhu was not in 
shape to send back the reply of King Edward 
it had to be transmitted by cable and it read : 

‘^The President, White House, Washington, Amer- 
ica. I thank you most sincerely for the kind message 
which I have just received from you by transatlantic 
wireless telegraphy. I sincerely reciprocate in the 
name of the people of the British Empire the cordial 
greetings and friendly sentiments expressed by you 
on behalf of the American nation and I heartily wish 
you and your country every possible prosperity. Ed- 
ward R. and I., Sandringham.” 

That cableless telegraphy might be done on 
a commercial basis to the best advantage the 
Marconi Company decided to put up two new 
and more powerful stations, one at Clifden on 
the coast of Ireland and a new one at Glace 
Bay on this side of the Atlantic. When these 
stations were finished the regular transmission 
of both private and public messages across the 
Atlantic began in competition with the cable 
lines. The exchange of cableless messages was 
kept up for ten months when the station at 


A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR 133 

Glace Bay burned down. Work on another sta- 
tion was started at once, however, and new ap- 
paratus was built for it. 

Again communication was set up between 
Glace Bay and Clifden, the first messages being 
sent and received by the Postmasters General 
of England and Canada. 

Now while it was very hard for any one to get 
a pass to go inside the cableless stations, even 
the directors of the Marconi Company having 
been denied that privilege, I went up to St. 
Johns the next summer for a week^s vacation 
and, incidentally, to see the station at Glace 
Bay. I felt pretty sure I should succeed for I 
knew one of the operators there. 

The station is about three miles from the vil- 
lage of Glace Bay, on the island of Cape Breton ; 
it belongs to Nova Scotia but is separated from 
it by the Strait of Canso. I didnT have to 
ask where the station was for four enormously 
high towers stood out before me like great sen- 
tinels, imposing and mysterious and they can 
be seen for miles around. I could also make out 
a dozen very high masts. 

The entire station is built on rising ground 
nearly a hundred feet above the level of the 


134 


JACK HEATON 


sea and below it lay the waters of big Glace 
Bay. Three low buildings — at least they looked 
very low to me as I gaged them with the height 
of the towers around them — are used for hous- 
ing the apparatus. 

After being halted several times by watch- 
men picketed on the grounds I finally got to the 
office and told the man in charge I wanted to see 
one of the operators, Howard Brice, who, you 
will remember, was one of my boon wireless 
chums of Montclair days. 

We hadnT seen each other since he and I 
became professional operators and we had a 
regular old sea-captain ^s time of it recounting 
our experiences. 

‘‘Want to see the station. Jack?’’ he asked. 

“Don’t mind if I do,” I replied in a don’t- 
give-a-care way. 

The building we were in not only contained 
the office but a sound proof room in which the 
receiving sets were placed. When we crossed 
the threshold I was standing in a room where 
even the directors of the company could not 
tread, not because they were, like angels, afraid, 
but the men higher up were afraid to let them, 


A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR 135 

for Marconi had a lot of would-be rivals in those 
days especially on this side of the Atlantic. 

The receivers were of the usual ship type, 
with magnetic detectors and head-phones, and 
these were connected to the leading-in wire of 
the aerial through switches and passed outside 
through insulators in the wall. Several other 
wires connected to ordinary telegraph instru- 
ments also passed through the wall. 

^‘You see, Jack,’’ my guide said, ‘‘these lines 
belong to the Western Union and the Canadian 
Pacific Railway Telegraph Company and by 
means of them the transatlantic cableless mes- 
sages are received for transmission to England 
or are forwarded to their destination on the 
Continent.” 

This was all interesting enough but there 
wasn’t much to see. We went over to another 
building which contained the power plant. In 
here a big steam engine was running an alter- 
nating current generator. 

“This generator develops 820 kilowatts, or 
about 1,100 horse-power, and,” he continued, 
“this is the most powerful generator ever built 
for a wireless transmitter.” 


JACK HEATON 


136 

Again interesting but as far as I could see 
they looked just like any other power plant. 
I sized them up just the same to see what I 
could see. 

‘‘Now, let’s take a peep at the sending ap- 
paratus,” and with that we strolled over to 
the third building. 

“Sounds like a young thunder factory!” I 
ejaculated as crashes of electric fire tore 
through the air like small bolts of lightning. 

“If we’d had this station down there in Mont- 
clair we’d have had them all by the ears, eh. 
Jack?” 

“I’d say we would, ’ ’ I returned as I measured 
with my eye the gigantic high potential ap- 
paratus. 

This was made up of low frequency trans- 
formers, revolving spark-gaps which changed 
the high pressure alternating currents into 
high frequency electricity. Then there were 
the high pressure oscillation transformers, the 
condensers and switches of large size which 
were actuated by telegraph sending keys. 
Yes, indeed, here were the real sights of a cable- 
less station and it was fully worth all that my 
round voyage cost me to see it. Having feasted 


A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR 137 

my eyes on this greatest of twentieth century 
wonders to my hearths content we went outside 
to get a close-up of the aerials. 

‘‘You see, Jack, we have two separate and dis- 
tinct aerial wire systems. The first, which is 
strung up between the four great towers is used 
only for sending and the second which is sus- 
pended from the sticks is used only for receiv- 
ing. These latticed towers are built of wood 
and each one is 410 feet high and together they 
form a square each side of which is 220 feet 
across. 

“The sending aerial is formed of a large 
number of nearly parallel wires all of them 
spread out at the top and coming together at 
the bottom like an inverted pyramid. This 
aerial which has 60,000 feet of wire in it was 
suspended from the tops of the towers. A 
leading-in wire is secured to the ends of all the 
aerial wires where they come together at the 
bottom. It leads, as you see,’’ he pointed to 
the side of the building, “into the room through 
insulators where it is connected to the rotary 
spark-gap through a closed circuit. 

“These masts, or sticks, which are arranged 
in three rows, hold up the receiving aerials. 


JACK HEATON 


138 

There are 18,000 feet of wire in it and it is made 
in the shape of a fan with the handle pointing 
in the direction of Clifden where our other sta- 
tion is located.^’ 

Before leaving Howard told me that when he 
heard the Marconi Company intended to build 
a pair of cableless stations it was his great am- 
bition to be one of the operators and in getting 
this position he had realized it. For myself I 
preferred to go on making my collection of 
cableless stations rather than to be planted up 
there at Glace Bay even though this was one 
of the three places in the world where the over- 
land telegraph lines and transatlantic cable- 
less meet and form a clearing house for the news 
of two continents. 

It was my intention to sail for Belfast, Ire- 
land — all the big steamers touch at that port 
on their way from New York to Liverpool — 
and go over to Clifden to see the cableless sta- 
tion there. Before leaving, however, I got it 
straight from Mr. Bottomley, who was the 
President of the American Marconi Company, 
that it was built from the same plans as the one 
at Glace Bay and that the apparatus was ex- 
actly the same. I concluded not to bother add- 


A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR 139 

ing it to my collection but to go to Paris direct 
and get the Eiffel Tower station instead. 1 

In this choice I was perhaps influenced some- 
what by getting a job as second wireless officer 
on the Kronprinzessin Cecilie, a fine fast pas- 
senger express steamer of the North German 
Lloyd Line. This German ship — as in fact all 
other transatlantic liners — was equipped with 
the Marconi system and this grouched the Ger- 
man officers to the last limits of despair. A lit- 
tle newspaper was published on board every 
day and, of course, the news in it came via 
wireless. Whenever we had trouble in get- 
ting the messages from the stations at Well- 
fleet, Mass., or Poldhu, England — as was always 
the case more or less when we were in mid- 
ocean — the paper which the Germans ran 
printed them anyway just as we took them 
down, and then they commented on what a 
rotten system Marconi’s was. 

The Kronprinzessin Cecilie touched at Ply- 
mouth, England, and then sailed across the 
English channel and touched again at Cher- 
bourg, France, wffiere I threw up the job, as my 
destination was Paris, and I arrived there a few 
hours later. 


140 


JACK HEATON 


You know the Eiffel Tower was built in the 
midst of the ornamental park of the Champ de 
Mars as the biggest attraction of the Paris Ex- 
position in 1885. When it was built wireless 
was an unknown means of communication and 
when the Exposition was over there was much 
talk about wrecking it, for it was not only use- 
less but the Parisians thought it a hideous 
object to be stuck up in a park. 

But when Marconi showed the world how to 
send messages across the ocean, and since one 
of the chief factors for long distance wireless 
transmission was a high aerial, it didn’t take 
half-an-eye for the French War Department to 
see that the Eiffel Tower, which was very nearly 
a thousand feet high, was just the thing to sup- 
port an aerial. 

Captain Ferrie, who had given much time to 
developing wireless apparatus for the Army, 
was put in charge of installing a small plant 
of about 15 horse-power simply to see what 
could be done with it. This experimental plant 
at once proved very useful in sending out time 
signals and weather reports to ships at sea and 
for the Navy Department to issue orders to 
Naval Commanders, but its greatest value was 


A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR 141 

shown during the Moroccan troubles when the 
War Department was able to keep in direct 
touch with the Army there through its station at 
Casablanca. 

The need of a new, permanent, high-powered 
station was strongly felt and work was com- 
menced on it in 1908. Now instead of a couple 
of makeshift shacks at the base of the tower 
a concrete building was put in under the ground 
so that its roof was on a level with the surface 
of the park. This was done in order that a 
clear view across the grounds could be had and 
also to prevent the noise of the sparks from 
being heard in the neighborhood, which would 
not only be disturbing, but, what mattered more, 
any one who knew the Morse code could read all 
the outgoing messages a block away. 

When I got settled in Paris I struck out to 
see the Eitfel Tower station. I found it was 
just about to be opened and it was my inten- 
tion to try to get a job there for I believed 
it would be the only way I’d ever get to see the 
installation. 

I asked a gendarme, as they call an armed 
policeman over there, who was standing hard 
by, where the office of the wireless station might 


JACK HEATON 


. 142 

happen to be — that is, I asked him in the deaf 
and dumb alphabet, and I gathered from the 
motions he made with his hands and arms that 
it was in the underground building. I hied me 
down the stairs and found myself in a small, 
central area-way from which doors around it 
opened into the office, receiving, dynamo and 
sending rooms. 

Not being able to read French, as I explained 
to some officials afterward, I had carelessly 
opened the door on which the sign read Bureau 
de Transmitteur instead of Bureau de Tele- 
graphie sans Fil with the result that I saw the 
whole blooming sending apparatus. There 
were two operators in charge but they didn’t 
think I was worth noticing. 

The sending apparatus was very much the 
same as that I saw in the cableless station at 
Glace Bay. This is easily explained because 
there is only one way to change a large amount 
of low pressure electricity such as is generated 
by an alternating current dynamo into high 
potential, high frequency electricity and that 
way is to use a transformer to step up the pres- 
sure of the alternating current; condensers are 
then charged with the latter current and this 


A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR 143^ 

in turn is discharged between a pair of spark 
balls, or a rotary spark-gap which is used for 
the same purpose. 

Not having been thrown out of the sending 
room and having seen all there was , to see I 
opened the door to the Bureau de Recepteur 
and took a good look at the receiving apparatus. 
The detectors were of the electrolytic type, each 
of the cups which contained the solution hav- 
ing three wires sealed in it instead of one ; this 
was the invention of Prof. Branly of Paris who 
got up the coherer several years before Mar- 
coni began his experiments in wireless. 

The door of the Installation d' Alimentation 
Electrique was open and I glanced in at the 
dynamos, motors and storage batteries and from 
the size of its equipment I judged the station to 
be about 100 horsepower. Having seen it all I 
opened the door of the Bureau de Telegraphie 
sans Fil and walked in just as we do in offices 
over here. 

Somebody must have told the Directeur, or 
manager as we would call him in good old Eng- 
lish, that I was coming for before I could ex- 
plain in sign language that I wanted a job he, 
with the aid of a couple of other conspirators. 


144 


JACK HEATON 


hustled me unceremoniously out, up the stairs 
and on to the green grass of the park. No, 
it wasn’t exactly a case of sour grapes but 
after I had seen the apparatus of the station 
and added it to my Christian Science collec- 
tion I didn’t want the job anyway. 

The most interesting feature of the Eiffel 
Tower wireless station is its aerial and before 
I left I studied it carefully. It is a one-sided 
affair, but this is not because its designer 
thought well of it but in virtue of the fact that 
the Eiffel Tower sets at one end of the Champ 
de Mars. 

If the tower had been built in the middle of 
the park the wires could have been brought 
down all around it on all sides thus forming 
what is called an umbrella aerial and this would 
have been good practise, as the engineers say. 
As it is there are six steel cables about % an 
inch in diameter secured to but insulated from 
the top of the tower on one side and these are 
guyed out in the shape of a fan and anchored 
at the other end of the park. 

The cables are set in stone posts which pro- 
ject above the ground and to prevent simple 
folks from laying their hands on them, in which 


A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR 145 

case their bodies would become conductors and 
allow a few million volts of high potential elec- 
tricity to pass through them, the posts are 
surrounded by iron fences. The main cables 
are connected together about half-way between 
the ground and the top of the tower with other 
and lighter cables and these are joined to a 
single leading-in cable which runs down to and 
passes through a window to the top of the area- 
way in the underground building. 

Finally the leading-in cable is connected to 
one end of a tuning coil, the other end of which 
is joined to a ground formed of metal plates 
having nearly 3000 square feet of surface and 
these are buried deeply in the earth far be- 
low the underground building. 

Before I left the States to get the Eiffel 
Tower station the Navy Department had con- 
tracted with the National Signaling Company , 
an American wireless telegraph concern, for the 
most powerful cableless plant that had yet been 
built. 

While I was in France work had been started 
on the towers and buildings at Arlington on 
the Potomac River near Washington and the 
machinery and apparatus for it was being built. 


JACK HEATON 


146 

After my return, with some jockeying, I landed 
a position with the National Signaling Com- 
pany in the testing department and so had the 
opportunity of watching the whole installation 
grow up of which I shall tell you presently. 

Finally when every piece of apparatus had 
been built and given exhaustive tests the equip- 
ment was shipped to Arlington, or, as some 
would-be high-brow tried to rename it, Eadio, 
and the engineers and working force of the 
Company were sent to Arlington to install it, 
get it into working order and make the final 
tests required by the Government before the 
latter took it over. 

When we reached Washington I could see the 
three great steel towers at Arlington looming 
up as high, it seemed to me, as the Washington 
Alonument itself. On reaching the Arlington 
station which sets on the crest of a liill in a 
corner of the Fort Myer Reservation, the tow- 
ers did not look so high, nor were they, for 
the tallest one was about 600 feet and the two 
shorter ones were 450 feet high. These three 
towers formed a triangle, the distance between 
the two shorter ones being 350 feet, and 450 feet 
between the taller and shorter ones. These 


A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR 147 

towers, which were complete and ready for the 
aerials, rested on concrete bases and were in- 
sulated from the ground by slabs of marble. 
There are three buildings and these were also 
ready for the installation. 

Now while the machinery and apparatus were 
being moved into the buildings and set in place 
a force of men was put to work on assembling 
the aerials and swinging them between the 
tops of the towers. These aerials are known 
as T, or flat-top aerials and right here I want to 
tell you how and why this type of aerial came 
to be. 

In the early days Marconi, and those who fol- 
lowed him, thought that a high vertical wire, 
that is, one sticking straight up in the air, was 
all that was needed to get distance. On ships 
the masts are never very high and so the late 
Lieutenant Hudgens of the U. S. Navy tried 
stringing the wires of the aerial down to the 
bow and stern of the battleship Kearsarge to 
give the wires a greater length. This sloping 
aerial gave so much better results than the 
straight, or vertical aerial that he then sus- 
pended the wires between the top of the masts 
of the ship and, lo-and-behold, it worked even 


JACK HEATON 


148 

better than before and thus it was that the T, 
or flat-top aerial came to be. 

To get the best results the aerials of two 
stations communicating with each other should 
both be vertical or flat-top, that is, a vertical 
wire will not receive from a flat-top nearly as 
well as from another one that is vertical and 
this is just as true the other way about. As 
all ships are fitted with flat-top aerials and 
as the Eiffel Tower aerial is neither the one 
kind nor the other but a sloping aerial and hence 
would receive from a flat-top as well as from 
a vertical aerial the Navy Department decided 
to use the T or flat-top aerial on the Arlington 
station. 

We assembled, tested and put up the three 
flat-top aerials between the towers and con- 
nected them together so that in effect a single 
long aerial was formed. Porcelain insulators 
of the kind on which high tension power trans- 
mission lines are carried are used to insulate the 
aerials from the towers. The leading-in cable 
runs from the aerials to which it is connected 
down to the operating room through a copper 
tube set in a glass window. 

The ground is formed of copper wires buried 


A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR 149 

deeply in the earth and radiating in every di- 
rection from the station. This network of wires 
extends over, I should say, ten acres, and this, 
of course, makes a very good ground. 

The current for energizing the sending ap- 
paratus is taken from the lines of the Potomac 
Light and Power Company; this runs an elec- 
tric motor of 200 horse power which in turn 
drives a 100 kilowatt alternating current gene- 
rator ; the current from the latter flows through 
a transformer which raises the pressure of it 
to 25,000 volts. Next a battery of compressed 
air condensers are charged with this high volt- 
age current and this is discharged by a rotating 
spark-gap. This spark-gap has a wheel, on the 
rim of which is set a number of metal points, or 
electrodes as they are called, and around them 
are an equal number of fixed metal points or 
electrodes. 

When the wheel revolves sparks are made 
only when the electrodes on the wheel and those 
that are fixed around it are exactly in a line. 
Now instead of a few big sparks taking place 
every second, a thousand smaller ones occur in 
a second and this makes a whistling sound 
which is heard by the operator who is listening- 


JACK HEATON 


150 

in at the distant station. The high frequency 
currents set up by the spark-gap then surge 
through an oscillation transformer which in- 
creases its pressure and finally into and through 
the aerial wire system where they are damped 
out in long electric waves. 

The Morse telegraph key is placed in the re- 
ceiving room and it works a control switch in 
the sending room. The control switch breaks 
up the current that flows from the generator 
into the transformer into dots and dashes. 

The receiving instruments have both elec- 
trolytic and crystal detectors, the other parts 
being made up of the usual variable condensers, 
tuning coils and oscillation transformer and 
head-phones. 

Well, at last everything was all ready for the 
final company test and I was mighty glad of 
it for things were getting very much on my 
nerves. A cableless station is altogether too 
big and cold-blooded a proposition for a fellow 
who likes a little excitement once in a while. 

The Navy Department had fitted out the 
cruiser Salem with a sending and a receiving 
apparatus exactly like that of the Arlington 
station except it was very much smaller. 


A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR 151 

On February 13, 1913, the Salem sailed from 
the League Island Navy Yard at the mouth of 
the Delaware River for the Mediterranean Sea 
so that the official tests of the Arlington sta- 
tion could be made. The letter D was used for 
the test signals and we sent these out from 
Arlington for 15 minutes each time before the 
messages were transmitted. 

Officials from the Navy Department gave us 
the messages to send and we were allowed un- 
der the terms of the contract to repeat each mes- 
sage three times to make sure the Salem got it, 
but no more. The Salem then followed by 
sending the test signal B and after this she sent 
four messages which the Captain gave her op- 
erators. This exchange of signals and mes- 
sages was made twice a day throughout the 
Salernos voyage across. 

The messages we sent from Arlington were 
received by the Salem up to a distance of 2,375 
miles, while the messages sent by the operators 
on the Salem were received by Arlington up ta 
a distance of 1,000 miles. Far greater dis- 
tances were covered by both the shore and ship 
stations but they were not accurate enough to 


152 JACK HEATON 

meet the conditions called for by the Navy De- 
partment. 

At night when the ether is quiet, as is always 
the case, the messages from both stations were 
sent and received over greater distances than 
by day and we were able to read what the Salem 
sent when she was out 1,600 miles and her 
operators got us up to 3,200 miles. Even 
when the Salem reached Gibraltar she could get 
Arlington’s signals but they were so feeble she 
could not take down our messages. 

The National Signaling Company having 
successfully completed the tests imposed by its 
contract with the Government now formally 
turned Arlington station over to the Navy De- 
partment and having added that great station 
to my collection I was ready to get back to the 
big town. 


CHAPTER VIII 


ABOAED A WARSHIP AT VERA CRUZ 

T rouble was brewing down in Mexico. 

Did I say was brewing! Well, what I 
should have said is that it had brewed, and will 
keep on brewing until Uncle Sam goes down 
there and cleans out Villa and all the other 
bandits and revolutionists. 

You say the Monroe Doctrine won’t permit 
it? Now there you’ve got the best of me; I 
have a very hazy idea of what the Monroe Doc- 
trine means but I’ve had occasion to observe 
that whenever a country can’t govern itself or 
the ruler of some country wants to govern the 
whole world Uncle Sam just naturally drives a 
gun carriage through the Monroe Doctrine and 
settles the affair to everybody’s satisfaction 
once and for all. He is very like a school 
teacher who is so much annoyed by a couple of 
his pupils that are constantly arguing and fight- 
ing he finally gets mad himself and licks both 
153 


154 jack HEATON 

of them and then things quiet down and become 
decent like. 

Getting down to cases, though, what I mean is 
that trouble was brewing between Mexico and 
the United States. The Mexicans had been 
fighting a long time among themselves ; Madero 
who had been president of the republic was shot 
and killed; Huerta, an Indian of Aztec stock, 
was president at that time and he carried things 
on with a high hand, while Carranza, a rebel 
who wanted to be president, was, with the aid 
of Villa and other revolutionists, doing his best 
to wrest the government from him. 

Your Uncle Sam thought about as much of 
President Huerta as he thinks now of the bandit 
Villa and would not recognize him as the head 
of the Mexican Government. His attitude nat- 
urally made Huerta very sore on the United 
States and, as I remarked before, trouble was 
brewing, for Huerta had been doing small, con- 
temptible things to aggravate the United States 
and now he pulled off another low down trick. 

It came about like this: in April, 1914, the 
U. S. S. Dolphin anchored in the bay of Tam- 
pico, Mexico, and the paymaster of the ship and 
some marines went over to town in a launch. 


ABOARD A WARSHIP 


155 


Their object in going ashore was to buy some 
gasoline but before they had gone very far a 
number of Huerta ^s Mexican soldiers arrested 
them, led them through the streets with a howl- 
ing mob of greasers after them and then threw 
them into jail. 

Rear Admiral Mayo of the Dolphin soon 
learned of the predicament of his men and de- 
manded of the Commander of the Mexican army 
to set them free immediately, if not sooner. 
The Commander, knowing full well what would 
happen if he tried to hold the marines, let them 
go and apologized for the mistake, as he called 
it. 

But the Admiral was not the kind of an offi- 
cer to let the Army or any other branch of the 
Mexican Government insult our men and get 
away with it. He therefore avowed that the 
Huerta government should salute our flag by 
firing guns and that this must be done on or be- 
fore a certain hour. 

In the meantime the Admiral communicated 
the incident to our government at Washington 
and this was done by sending wireless messages 
from his flagship to our Darien mreless station 
at Camento, Panama, and from there it was 


JACK HEATON 


156 

retransmitted to Arlington. The Darien sta- 
tion which had been completed only a little 
while before, has a sending apparatus equal in 
power to the Arlington station but it can send 
and receive farther than the latter station be- 
cause all three of its towers are 600 feet high. 

Mr. Bryan, who was then Secretary-of-State, 
got in touch with Mr. 0 ’Shaughnessy, the U. S. 
charge d'affaires in Mexico City, and he took 
up the matter with President Huerta. The 
erstwhile President of Mexico also apologized 
profusely, believing that he could in this way 
get out of saluting our flag. Our government 
insisted that apologies were not enough but that 
the Mexican Government must salute our flag as 
Eear Admiral Mayo had ordered, and this 
Huerta finally agreed to do. 

Knowing the Mexican disposition, whose 
watchword is mahana (which means to-mor- 
row), and having every reason to believe that 
there would be a hitch in the proceedings, the 
Admiral extended the time in which the salute 
was to be given to May 12. 

As before, the 12th went by and the New 
York papers stated that Huerta had failed in 
his promise to salute the flag. I doped it out 


ABOARD A WARSHIP 


157 


that there would be big doings down there and, 
unlike the greasers, I did not let mahana inter- 
fere with my patriotic obligations to Uncle Sam, 
but I went right over to a recruiting station on 
23rd Street and enlisted in the Navy as an 
‘^electrician for wireless telegraphy.^ ^ 

At that time a man who wanted to enlist in 
the Navy as a wireless operator had to have 
“a working knowledge of telephones, measur- 
ing instruments, call bells, etc., and he must be 
able to connect up same to batteries and make 
minor repairs to them.’’ Also “familiarity 
with ordinary telegraph instruments while an 
aid in acquiring a working knowledge of wire- 
less telegraph instruments, is not an essential 
qualification for enlistment as a wireless tele- 
graph operator.” 

This is what the enlistment circular I was 
given to read said but, of course, it was meant 
for men who knew a little about electricity and 
nothing about wireless telegraphy to start with. 
But here I was a full fledged operator, who had 
worked with Marconi and had helped to install 
the equipment in the Arlington station! 

The circular went on to say that “applicants 
would be enlisted as electricians, third class, at 


JACK HEATON 


158 

$30 per mouth. Some come-down for a man 
who had been a first wireless ofificer on a trans- 
atlantic liner and who had earned, at least on 
one round voyage, $200 a month, to say nothing 
of one who had worked with Marconi! 

As I read on, the circular further stated 
‘ ‘ that men detailed as operators will be eligible 
to be promoted to higher ratings when they 
qualify as operators and have served the re- 
quired probationary time under the regulations 
through the successive grades to chief electri- 
cians at $60 per month when they prove their 
ability to take charge of the wireless telegraph 
station and interior communication on board 
ship and have been assigned to duty.’’ 

A man who knew nothing about wireless but 
wanted to become an operator was given a 
course of instruction at some naval wireless 
school or wireless telegraph shore station and 
when he was proficient enough he was assigned 
to a cruising ship either in charge of a station 
or else as an assistant to the electrician in 
charge. 

As expert wireless operators were always in 
demand in the Navy I was at once assigned to 
the Alabama as an assistant operator and it 


ABOARD A WARSHIP 


159 

was not long before I was rated as a first class 
electrician. 

I joined the Alabama over at the Brooklyn 
Navy Yard, at New York, where she had been 
in dry-dock undergoing repairs and the next 
day we rode down the East River, through New 
York Bay and out to sea where we joined the 
North Atlantic Fleet under the command of 
Rear-Admiral Fletcher. 

Surely enough, we got the news from Arling- 
ton on the 18th that Huerta had put off salut- 
ing the flag though still agreeing he would do 
so; President Wilson was heartily tired of it 
all and he finally sent an ultimatum to the sly 
old fox at Mexico City. This was to the effect 
that if he did not salute the flag by 6 o’clock 
of the afternoon of the 19th he (President Wil- 
son) would ask Congress the next day to permit 
him to send the army and navy to Mexico to 
force him (Huerta) to do so. 

To see that this was done on schedule time we 
received orders by wireless to sail on the 14th 
to Mexico. The North Atlantic Fleet was 
formed of some thirty-six warships, and these 
were manned by no less than 15,000 blue jackets 
and marines. 


i6o JACK HEATON 

We were soon heading south. Talk about 
cleaning up Mexico ! Why, we had a fleet that 
could have cleaned up the world, and a mighty 
pretty sight did she make, too. When we got 
there the fleet was split up into two squadrons, 
one going to Tampico and the other, to which 
the Alabama belonged, going to Vera Cruz, the 
Atlantic port nearest to Mexico City. 

From what I gathered from the officers the 
purpose of President Wilson was not to make 
war on poor old war-ridden, moth-eaten Mexico, 
but simply to blockade the ports of Tampico 
and Vera Cruz and take over their customs 
houses until such time as Huerta could see the 
necessity of ordering the Commander of the 
Mexican Army to salute. 

Two days later when we were steaming at 
full speed for Mexican waters, I caught the 
message that Huerta had again agreed to salute 
and since he knew we were coming I believed 
that he would do it this time sure and that our 
next orders would be to steam to northern 
waters. I was out of luck, that’s all. But we 
kept right on going just the same. 

What Huerta really said was that if his 
Army fired the salute it would be right, he 


ABOARD A WARSHIP i6i 

thought, for our Navy to salute in turn. 
Huerta was informed that this wias always the 
custom when salutes of this kind were fired and 
that our Navy would, of course, return it. 

We learned by wireless the next day that 
Huerta had again flopped over and he now 
wanted the salute to be fired gun for gun, that 
is, his army would fire the first gun, then our 
fleet would fire the next one and so on. Not 
only this but he wanted President Wilson to 
sign some kind of a paper and tied the whole 
proceedings in a hard knot with a lot of other 
strings. These conditions which Huerta wanted 
to impose President Wilson would not agree 
to and there was nothing else left for him to 
do but to back the ultimatum on the day he said 
he would. 

On the way down I had plenty of time to look 
over the Alabama, to get acquainted with the 
men and to get my bearings. I can’t tell you 
here the little things that happened on board 
but I must say a word about the Alabama, 

The battleship, in her day, was the giant of 
all the sea-fighting craft and her armor, that is, 
the steel covering that protects her, is a great 
piece of work. First of all the whole main deck 


i 62 


JACK HEATON 


is made of thick sheets of steel called armor 
plate and this covers the ship from her stem to 
stern-post just above the water line. 

The part of a battleship where a shell hit- 
ting her would likely do the most damage is 
at her water-line and if a shell should hit there 
and explode it might tear out a big hole when 
she would quickly fill with water and sink. To 
prevent this from happening a very thick band 
of steel armor plate is riveted all the way round 
her at the water-line. 

All the machinery and equipment of the ship 
including her engines, boilers and machinery, 
the powder magazines and shell rooms, the pas- 
sageways through which the ammunition is 
taken, the wireless room, in fact everything ex- 
cept her guns, is in the hold below this strong 
deck. Of course there must be some openings 
in this deck but these are protected by gratings 
of heavy steel, the bars of which set closely 
enough together to keep fragments of shells 
from going through should one hit and explode 
on deck. 

On our battleships the main battery is gener- 
ally made up of four 10 inch, 12 inch or 13 inch 


ABOARD A WARSHIP 163 

breech loading guns and these are mounted in 
revolving turrets one of which is forward and 
one aft. The Alabama had four 13 inch guns 
in the large turrets and twelve 6 inch guns on 
the broadsides. I ’m telling you that if Huerta 
had been at Vera Cruz when we got there and 
taken a look into the muzzle of one of our 13 
inch guns he’d have saluted the flag without 
any more of that mahana business. As it was 
he was safely out of range of our guns for 
Mexico City is over 200 miles from Vera Cruz. 

In the early days of wireless when every 
Tom, Dick and Harry was getting up a ^^new” 
wireless system the Navy Department tried out 
all of them. It would not use the Marconi 
system because the government wanted to buy 
the apparatus outright while the policy of the 
Marconi Company was to lease their apparatus. 

The favorite type of wireless apparatus used 
by the Navy Department was known as the 
T elef unhen, a German getup that was a com- 
bination of the Slaby-Arco and the Braun-Sie- 
mens and Halske systems. The transmitter of 
our station was one of this kind and consisted 
of an induction coil with a mercury turbine in- 


JACK HEATON 


164 

terruptor, an elective motor to run it and the 
usual key, loose coupled tuning coil and con- 
densers. 

The receiver was of a later type and had both 
a crystal detector and a vacuum tube detector, 
the latter being the invention of Dr. Fleming 
of England who has been Marconi ^s technical 
adviser for many years. This detector is really 
a small incandescent lamp bulb with not only 
a filament but a metal plate sealed in it. The 
filament is kept at a white heat by a current 
from a storage battery. 

When the telephone receivers are connected 
to the hot filament and the cold plate electrodes, 
the high frequency currents that are set up in 
the aerial by the incoming electric waves are 
changed into direct currents and the varying 
strength of these act on the head-phones. This 
detector is very sensitive and needs no adjust- 
ing. 

Many of the messages we sent and received 
were in straight English but nearly all the im- 
portant ones, especially those for and from 
Washington, were in code, the purpose of which 
was to prevent any one else, except our offi- 
cers, from reading them and this kind of mes- 


ABOARD A WARSHIP 165 

sage is not very interesting but we know that 
something is going on anyway. 

We anchored off Vera Cruz on the 21st and 
the natives must have thought from the num- 
ber of warships that hemmed them in that we 
were going to blow them to smithereens. A 
few hours after our arrival we landed a thou- 
sand marines and they drove back Huerta’s 
soldiers and captured the customs house. 

The chief reason this was done was because 
our government had got wise to the fact that a 
couple of German ships were scheduled to ar- 
rive at Vera Cruz with a cargo of guns and am- 
munition for Huerta, and our Commander had 
received orders on the way down to prevent 
this by seizing the customs house. 

There was not much show of armed resist- 
ance on the part of Huerta’s men but in the 
scuffle that took place four of our men were 
killed and about twenty were wounded. I made 
up my mind right then and there that if I ever 
got a chance I’d blow the sombrero off of 
some greaser out of pure revenge. 

The favorite method of warfare that is waged 
by the Mexicans is sniping, that is, they hide 
behind something and take a shot now and then 


i66 


JACK HEATON 


at you. As a result of sniping a few days 
later the number of our men that had been killed 
was brought up to eighteen and the number of 
wounded to 71. 

When things had quieted down Hart Douglas, 
another operator and I got a six hour shore 
leave. We buckled on our holsters and slipped 
our revolvers into them with small thought of 
having a chance to use them. We took a look 
around the town and all went well for awhile 
when zipj zip, a couple of bullets whizzed by 
my ear and Hart dropped with a bullet in his 
lung. 

I whipped out my gun and wheeled around 
just in time to spot a couple of snipers lying on 
a near-by roof with their rifles pointing toward 
us. I emptied the five chambers at them as 
fast as I could pull the trigger. I got one of 
them; he raised himself to his feet and pitched 
headlong into the street. But the other one 
got me for he drew a bead on my gun arm 
which, also don’t forget, is my key arm. A 
couple of marines put poor Hart on a stretcher 
and carried him over to a field hospital. An- 
other bound up my arm, walked with me over to 



“I WHIPPED OUT MY GUN JUST IN TIME TO SPOT A COUPLE OP 

SNIPERS”— Paf/e 166 




ABOARD A WARSHIP 167 

the launch and when I got aboard my ship the 
doctor dressed it. 

No more shore leaves were granted the men 
because two perfectly good operators had gone 
ashore and two miserable good-for-nothing op- 
erators had returned. Hart hovered between 
life and death for weeks but he finally pulled 
through though he never will be as good a man 
as he was. I came along all right but my hand 
seemed paralyzed from the wrist down and it 
was many a moon before I could use a key again 
with my right hand. I guess you see now why I 
like those greasers so well. 

Our marines remained on duty until the end 
of the month when General Funston arrived 
from Galveston with about four thousand troops 
and took possession of the port. It was hard 
to see what turn affairs would take next for 
Huerta had an army of 5,000 men not very far 
from Vera Cruz. But I guess he had heard of 
General Funston before and he didn’t care 
about being captured as Aguinaldo, the Philip- 
pine leader, was. 

Instead of having some small war the dip- 
lomats of the ABC governments of South 


i68 


JACK HEATON 


America, as Argentine, Brazil and Chile are 
called, offered to try to negotiate a friendly 
settlement between the United States and 
Mexico. President Wilson, who liked peace 
and hated war, at once accepted their kind 
offer and agreed to send representatives to their 
proposed conference. The following day 
Huerta agreed to send his representatives to the 
ABC conference which was to be held in the 
town of Niagara Falls on the Canadian side 
of the river. 

Finally, when all the representatives met, the 
first thing that was done was to have an armis- 
tice signed by the United States and Huerta’s 
government. As soon as this was done 
Huerta’s representatives tried to have the 
United States withdraw its forces from Vera 
Cruz and the United States forego the salute 
for the insult to our flag. The representatives 
of the United States asked only that Huerta 
resign. 

After deliberating for five weeks the repre- 
sentatives of all the countries agreed that a 
provisional government should be established 
in Mexico, and that Huerta should resign ; that 
the United States should not ask Mexico to pay 


ABOARD A WARSHIP 169 

an indemnity nor to ask for a salute or other 
apology for the insult to the flag at Tampico 
and that our troops were to remain at Vera 
Cruz. 

In the meantime Huerta was being hard 
pressed by Carranza on the north and the rebel 
Zapata on the south and with our troops oc- 
cupying Vera Cruz it evidently suited him very 
well to resign. So on the 10th of July Huerta 
appointed Chief Justice Corbajol to be presi- 
dent in his place. 

It was common talk among the blue-jackets 
on our ship that Huerta had some 3,000,000 
dollars deposited in banks somewhere in Eu- 
rope and that he planned to go there. Be that 
as it may he handed in his resignation to the 
Chamber of Deputies a week later and left for 
Puerto, Mexico, on a special train under heavy 
guard. From there he sailed for Jamaica and 
thence for Europe. 

Thus it was that Huerta, the Indian descend- 
ant of the Aztecs, who always went one way and 
came back another, got out of saluting our flag 
and probably saved his life. 


CHAPTEE IX 


ON A SUBMARINE CHASER 

ERY shortly after Huerta resigned the 



V presidency of Mexico and made his get- 
away, the ex-Kaiser let loose the war-dogs of 
Europe and here I was signed up for four years 
in the Navy and, I figured, didn’t stand a ghost 
of a chance of breaking into the fight. It 
seemed to me a pretty tough deal that old 
Huerta could resign his job while I, a free 
American citizen, couldn ’t quit, resign, go-over- 
the-hill, or anything. 

What I wanted to do was to get over to Eng- 
land and sign up there for it was dollars to 
doughnuts in my mind that there would be some 
small bickerings going on between the British 
and the German navies and it would be well 
worth while to see those big guns get into action. 
I hadn’t the remotest idea, then, that the Im- 
perial German Navy, as those hoches so loved 


ON A SUBMARINE CHASER 171 

to call it, would be afraid to come out in the 
offing and put up a fight. But when it came to 
torpedoing unarmed passenger ships loaded 
with women and children, or hospital ships 
carrying wounded soldiers they were right there 
Fritzy-on-the-spot with their Uackheads as they 
called their Whitehead torpedoes. 

While the ex-Kaiser’s navy could not be in- 
duced to leave its mine-protected harbors and 
do battle with the British fleet — no, not even 
if all Germany starved to death — crafty, old 
Admiral von Tirpitz began to build up a fright- 
ful fleet of U-boats with the avowed intention 
of sinking every merchant ship, no matter what 
flag she flew, if she carried foods or munitions 
to England and her Allies. 

As the United States was shipping cargoes 
of both of these commodities to Great Britain 
and France, which was entirely within her 
rights according to international law, it was 
not long, as you can imagine, before the Ger- 
man U-boats were sinking our ships and kill- 
ing our men. 

It was bewhiskered Admiral von Tirpitz who 
figured out and showed the ex-Kaiser that the 
only way left open for Germany to win the war 


172 


JACK HEATON 


was to sink every ship afloat that did not fly the 
German flag, and soon after this program was 
agreed to by the war-lords they seemed in a 
fair way to succeed, for they were sinking ships 
faster than the Allies and the United States 
could replace them. 

Any number of schemes to beat the U-boats 
were thought up and while most of them were 
quite impracticable there were a few that 
proved effective when put to the test. One 
way was to build more merchant ships every 
month than the U-boats could sink and when 
Uncle Sam put the job into Mr, Schwab’s hands 
this was done. Another plan was to hunt down 
the U-boats with submarine chasers, A sub- 
marine chaser is a small, high-speed boat carry- 
ing one or more rapid fire guns. 

As you know a submarine can shoot a tor- 
pedo at the biggest ship afloat and if it hits 
her she is sure to sink in a few minutes and 
yet it is the easiest thing in the world to send 
a U-boat to the bottom if you can only get 
a chance to land a shell on her. 

Just before we got into the war Germany 
built two great submarines each of which was 
over 300 feet long. One of these U-boats was 


ON A SUBMARINE CHASER 173 

the Deutschland and the other was the U-53, 
and both had a cruising radius of about 5,000 
miles, that is, they could travel that distance 
without having to take on food or fuel. 

No one here ever thought that a submarine 
could make a trip across the ocean but the 
Deutschland did it. She left Bremen, Germany, 
and submerged while in the river, then she 
slipped out into the seaway under the British 
fleet that had the German warships bottled 
up, made the passage of the North Sea on 
and under the water, thence through the Eng- 
lish Channel going this dangerous route en- 
tirely under water and across the Atlantic 
Ocean during which she submerged only when 
she saw some of the Allies^ warships. 

Then one fine morning, 16 days later, she 
came to the surface in Chesapeake Bay and 
docked at Baltimore. There she unloaded a 
cargo of dye-stuffs and synthetic gems and took 
on a cargo of rubber, and, what was of more im- 
portance, secret papers which Count von Bern- 
sdorf, Germany's ambassador to the United 
States, could not trust to go any other way. 
On sailing she made her way to the mouth of 
the bay, submerged to escape the British ships 


174 


JACK HEATON 


which were laying in wait for her beyond the 
three mile limit and returned to her home port. 
Later on she made another round voyage with 
equal success. 

When we got into the war it was clear that we 
had a war-zone right here at home and one that 
was not to be sneezed at, for, since a subma- 
rine could be built large enough to travel the 
whole distance from Europe to America with- 
out having to be convoyed by a base, or mother- 
ship as she is called, Germany could as easily 
send over to our shores one or a dozen subma- 
rines as large as the Deutschland, fitted out with 
rapid-fire guns and torpedoes and do a lot of 
damage to our shipping and even to our cities. 
The Navy Department believed that the best 
way to protect our coast was to build a large 
fleet of U-boat chasers and this work was gone 
ahead with as fast as possible. 

Now while I can use a key with my left hand 
nearly as well as I could with my right, still 
my arm pained me a good deal and I could have 
gotten a long leave of absence if I had asked 
for it. So when I told the commander I wanted 
to be transferred to a U-boat chaser he fixed 
it 0. K. for me and I was assigned to the Second 


ON A SUBMARINE CHASER 175 

Naval District which patrolled from Newport 
to the First and Third Naval Districts. 

The chaser I was assigned to was a brand- 
new one just off the ways and of the very latest 
type; she had a length of 110 feet, a beam a 
little under 15 feet and a draft of about 4 feet. 
She was built chiefly of wood but she had a 
pair of steel masts and a crowds nest for the 
lookout whose job it was to watch for U-boats. 
She was powered with a steam engine but in- 
stead of coal she burned oil under her boilers. 
Her large size made her very speedy and she 
could do 25 knots, if she had to, which was twice 
as fast as the fastest U-boat could do. 

The aerial was stretched between her masts 
and the leading-in wire was connected to it 
near the rear mast and followed it down to the 
deck where it passed through an insulator in the 
latter, and on into the operating room. This 
was about the smallest space I ever got into 
which was graced by the name of an operating 
room but I had no kick coming as we were not 
afloat all the time. 

The sending set had a % kilowatt transformer 
and the receiving set was fitted with both crys- 
tal and vacuum detectors ; the whole space 


JACK HEATON 


176 

taken up by them was probably not more than 
5 cubic feet. Well, so much for the chaser. 

There were only 14 men in our crew and 
there was far less formality on board than on a 
battleship. Bill Adams and I got to be pretty 
good pals. The first time I met him he was 
trying out one of her Hotchkiss semi-automatic 
guns and I was watching him. 

‘‘Where did you get that chunk of mud?’’ he 
queried as he pointed the gun at an imaginary 
U-boat. 

“Speaking to me?” I asked in turn. 

“You said it,” he replied bluntly. 

“If you refer to the sparkler on my an- 
nularis finger I have to inform you, sir, that 
it came from the land of the Earipunas about 
1500 miles up the Amazon river,” I explained 
with great perspicacity. 

You see, I had had the diamonds cut that 
Princess Mabel gave me and the one I wore 
was a regent weighing about 2 carats and it 
was mounted in a Tiffany setting. In fact it 
was altogether too big a diamond for any ordi- 
nary blue- jacket to come by honestly. 

“That’s where it came from, but I’m askin’ 
you, as man to man now, where did yon get it ? ” 


ON A SUBMARINE CHASER 177 

Right where it came from/’ I put it straight 
back to him. 

If it hadn’t been for my game arm I guess 
Bill and I would have settled the mooted ques- 
tion as to where my chunk of mud came from 
by referring it to the court of last resort, by 
which I mean the manly art of hit-^em-again, 
goh. 

‘‘Put up your dukes,” commanded Bill at 
the same time striking an attitude of a gas- 
house slugger. 

Now to get my right hand up I had to lift 
it with my left and when Bill saw this he yelled, 
‘ ‘ time, you win ! ’ ’ 

Then his eyes softened, his voice lost its 
harshness and he became sympathetic. He 
wanted to know how it happened and all about 
it. And then we got the matter of the chunk 
of mud straightened out to Bill’s satisfaction. 
From that time on Bill and I were pals and we 
used to swap stories. He had been in every 
corner on the face of the earth except South 
America and his stock of experiences was a 
large one. To keep even with him I had to 
manufacture tales out of raw material as I 
went along and I often thought he did the same 


JACK HEATON 


178 

thing. Say, he certainly put over some regular 
crawlers. He never got tired of talking about 
the prospects of mining diamonds in Brazil and 
all I had to do to get him going was to flash 
my sparkler on him and he was transported as 
if by magic to equatorial South America. 

Like dozens of other fellows I have met, Bill 
was a strange contradiction of brains in that 
he was a natural bom hard boiled egg and yet 
when a fellow needed a friend he was as compas- 
sionate as a Salvation Army lass in a trench 
under fire; again he was ignorant, yet wanted 
to learn. For instance he wanted me to teach 
him wireless ; it was all vague and intangible to 
him. He had to have something he could see 
in three dimensions instead of having to visual- 
ize it in his mind; his one big talent lay in his 
being able to hit a target with a projectile of 
small or large size and accordingly he was able 
to serve his Uncle Sam nobly and with telling 
effect. 

You may or may not know it but a fellow 
can join the navy and live aboard ship a long 
time and still know but very little about any 
part of her, except his own particular branch, 
unless he keeps his eyes and ears open and talks 


ON A SUBMARINE CHASER 


179 


with fellows who know and can and will answer 
his questions intelligently. Bill was ignorant 
when it came to book-learning but he knew all 
about submarines and submarine chasers from 
their bottoms up. 

I had asked him why it was that a torpedo 
from a U-boat couldn’t hit a submarine chaser 
and also to tell me something about the fighting 
qualities of U-boats. 

‘‘You see, matey,” explained Bill wisely, “the 
torpedoes made for the Kaiser’s U-boats are ad- 
justed so that after they are shot from their 
tubes they run through the water at an even 
depth of between 8 and 9 feet below the surface. 
Now a boat of any size draws far more water 
than this and, of course, if the torpedo hits 
her at all it will be below the water line and 
she goes down. But this chaser of ours draws 
only 4 feet of water and so a torpedo, if it be- 
haves itself, would pass clean under her and 
never touch her. 

“The trouble is,” he went on, “that there 
never was a torpedo made that stuck to its 
course and it is liable to shift to the port or 
starboard or to come to the surface and for this 
reason we never take a chance but dodge them. 


i8o 


JACK HEATON 


You can always tell when a torpedo is coming 
by the thin white wake she makes on top of 
the water and while a ship can’t get out of 
its way, a speedy little boat like ours can make 
a quick turn and give it a wide berth. ’ ’ 

‘^Who got up the idea of a submarine 
chaser I ’ ’ 

‘‘Well, that I don’t know about, matey, but 
I do know that when Germany sent out her 
first U-boats to the coast of Great Britain to 
sink her ships, all sorts of motor boats which 
had a length of 40 feet and over were pressed 
into service; these boats had guns mounted in 
them and they combed the sea in search of the 
submarine enemy. 

“The first German U-boats were slow old 
craft and they stuck close to the coast where 
the ships were the thickest. This made it easy 
for the British armed motor-boat patrols to 
hunt them out and send them to the bottom. It 
was soon seen that larger and faster patrol 
boats carrying heavier guns were needed to 
keep up with the newer and faster U-boats that 
were sent to take the place of those the British 
sunk and so speedy 80 foot boats were built 
specially for patrolling. 


ON A SUBMARINE CHASER i8i 


the time we got into the war the U-boats 
were so big and fast that to catch them we had 
to have regular torpedo boats, except they are 
without torpedoes, built to run them down and 
this is exactly what this chaser we are now on 
is. With our chaser we can go twice as fast as 
any U-boat the Germans ever sent out and I’m 
telling you, matey, that if I ever spot a U-boat 
coming to the top and she is inside the range 
of this Hotchkiss her crew might just as well 
kiss the Kaiser good-night.” 

The way the submarine chasers work is like 
this: A base is set up on shore close to that 
part of the coast waters, or zone as it is called, 
that a squadron, which is formed of a dozen 
chasers has to patrol. The shore base is fitted 
up with living quarters for the crews of the 
chasers, besides reserve crews who may be 
needed in an emergency, and there are also ar- 
tificers, that is mechanics, carpenters, painters, 
etc., who stayed on shore so that when we were 
relieved from duty and came in, our boats were 
looked after as carefully and overhauled as 
thoroughly as a millionaire’s automobile. 

The base also has a wireless station and any 
chaser can get in touch with it should occasion 


i 82 


JACK HEATON 


arise for her to do so. Each base also has one 
or more destroyers which carry heavier guns 
and these are stationed near by so that should 
the enemy loom up and prove too much for the 
guns of our chasers the larger boats can be 
signaled to help. 

When a squadron of chasers leaves its base 
for the zone it is to patrol it is split up into two 
divisions of six boats each and a division oificer 
is in charge of each one. Each chaser is given 
a certain area to patrol and she works with all 
the other chasers in her squadron, the shore sta- 
tion and ships at sea. If a U-boat has been 
sighted at sea, the ship who has picked her up 
immediately sends a wireless message to the 
base which in turn informs the commander of 
the squadron. 

Should a U-boat venture into one of our zones 
the chasers get as busy as hornets and scout 
around until she either slips away or comes to 
the top to enable her commander to take a look 
around through his periscope to see if there is 
a ship in sight worth using a torpedo on. 

Besides the regular wireless set each sub- 
marine chaser is fitted with a sound conduction 


ON A SUBMARINE CHASER 183 


signalling system and this is used to detect 
the presence of a U-boat when it is submerged 
■and cannot be seen, though to do this the enemy 
boat must be near-by. This conduction scheme 
is very simple and youdl get me fine as 1 ex- 
plain it. 








Water, as you know, conducts sound waves to 
much greater distances than air does. You 
must have often mJide the experiment when in 
swimming of ducking your head under water 
and listening while another fellow would strike 
a couple of stones together under water at a 
distance of thirty or forty feet away from you ; 


JACK HEATON 


184 

and yet yon could hear them click as they struck 
each other as plainly as you could in air a couple 
of feet away. 

Now, signalling between submerged subma- 
rines or a submarine and a chaser is carried on 
on exactly this same principle, that is by the 
conduction of sound waves through the water. 
To do this kind of wireless signalling each sub- 
marine has a high-frequency sound producing 
apparatus, or oscillator as it is called, attached 
to the hull. It consists of a diaphragm, or disk, 
that is set into very rapid vibration by means 
of an electromagnet, just as the diaphragm of a 
telephone receiver is made to vibrate by its 
electromagnet. 

The disk, or diaphragm, which is very much 
larger than that of a telephone receiver, sets in 
the water and when it is made to vibrate by 
closing the circuit with the key it sends out 
trains of sound waves to considerable distances 
through the water. 

The other submarine, or chaser, is fitted with 
a like disk which is fixed to a microphone, or 
telephone transmitter, and to this a battery and 
telephone receiver is connected. When the high 
frequency sound waves from one submarine 


ON A SUBMARINE CHASER 185 

reaches the second submarine they impinge on 
the disk of the microphone when it vibrates; 
this varies the battery current flowing through 
the microphone and you hear the dots and 
dashes in the receiver. 

Now when a U-boat, or any other kind of a 
power vessel, gets within a certain range of the 
chaser the hum of the machinery in her sets the 
hull into vibration and you can hear it in the 
receivers. So, you see, whether a U-boat is 
afloat or submerged it is pretty hard for her to 
escape the eternal vigilance of the chaser. 

We had received word by wireless that a 
U-boat had been sighted about a hundred miles 
otf the coast and that she was one of gigantic 
size. We swept our area with great zeal, the 
lookouts in the crow’s nest being changed every 
two hours ; the gunners were at their guns ready 
for instant action and John Paul Jones Boggs, 
the other operator and I took turn about listen- 
ing-in. 

I don’t want to brag about myself but I found 
out a long time ago when I was a kid operator 
back home that I had a more sensitive ear than 
any of the other fellows, that is, I could dif- 
ferentiate dots and dashes and take down mes- 


i86 


JACK HEATON 


sages that they could only get as a jumble of 
signals. Later on I began to experiment with 
head-phones and tried out every make I could 
get hold of in order to find one that was par- 
ticularly sensitive and especially suited to my 
ear. 

When I was chief wireless operator on the 
Andalusian I met operators from all over the 
world. Once when I was in London I scraped 
up an acquaintance with a young Swede and 
he had about half-a-dozen pairs of head-phones 
that he had picked up in different countries. 
Telephone receivers for wireless work are like 
violins in that no two of them are alike and 
you can’t tell by their appearance what they 
are really worth ; like violins, too, telephone re- 
ceivers improve with age provided the magnets 
are made of the right kind of steel and properly 
tempered. 

One of the pairs of head-phones this Swede 
operator showed me was made in Sweden by the 
Ericsson Telephone Manufacturing Company y 
and it was by far the most sensitive phone I had 
ever used. I bought the pair of him for a 
sovereign but they are worth their weight in 
gold. With this pair of Ericsson’s on my head 


ON A SUBMARINE CHASER 187 

I was listening-in for all I was worth. I kept 
this up intermittently for about 6 hours when I 
was rewarded by hearing the faint whirring 
sound of a propeller. I reported it to my 
commander and he said it was a U-boat all 
right. 

He had our engine stopped so that I could 
hear her to the best advantage. The sound of 
her machinery through the water got a little 
louder and then stopped entirely and we guessed 
that she was resting. Not to be fooled we stuck 
right to our posts another five hours but there 
was nary a sound from her. 

Then the lookout in the crow^s-nest tele- 
phoned down that he had sighted the periscope 
of a U-boat. Hid you ever see a field of race 
horses just before the signal was given them 
to start? Well, every man-jack of us felt just 
as high strung and spirited only we didn T show 
it. The commander ordered me to signal all the 
other U-boat chasers of our squadron to join 
us. 

The U-boat had come to the surface so that 
her captain could take a look around and see if 
there was a ship in sight that was worth sinking. 
Seeing nothing but our little boat the U-boat 


i88 


JACK HEATON 


came awash, that is her conning tower pro- 
jected above the water and her deck was jnst 
level with the surface of the sea. The cap- 
tain of the TJ-hoat was evidently observing us 
through a port from the inside of the conning 
tower and seeing that our guns were manned 
and that we were making for her at full speed 
he had ordered her guns to be brought into 
action. Each gun was mounted on her deck in a 
gun-well and was hoisted into place together 
with its gunner by a plunger worked by com- 
pressed air. 

We closed in on her and then the shells began 
to fly. A high sea was running so that it was 
well nigh impossible for her gunners to hit us 
or for ours to hit her, but soon a shell, bad 
luck to it, carried away one of our masts arid 
my aerial with it. I rushed up on deck and 
there I saw eight or ten of our little chasers 
heading for the U-boat, which was the TJ-53, 
the largest submarine that Germany had turned 
out with the exception of the Deutschland. 

As each chaser came up the fight got hotter 
but the U-fboat stayed in the game until her 
captain saw our destroyer coming and then he 
concluded it was time to submerge her. We 







“A BRIGHT FLASH OF BLUE FIRE SHOT UP THROUGH THE 

HOLE ” — rage 189 




ON A SUBMARINE CHASER 189 

knew her captain had given the order to his 
wheelsman to make her dive for her guns and 
gunners began to disappear in the deck-wells 
and in a few seconds the covers closed down on 
the latter water-tight. Her hatches were closed 
and her engines, which had been started, pro- 
pelled her slowly through the water which must 
be done to make her dive at the proper angle. 

Just as her bow submerged Bill put over a 
shell with a how trajectory , that is, he aimed 
his gun so that when he fired the projectile 
shot high into the air and seemed as if it would 
go far over the U-boat. But Bill knew what 
he was doing and the shell fell squarely on the 
U-boaUs deck just aft her conning tower. 

Having found the range he planted three 
more shells on her with marvelous accuracy; 
the last one went through her bow and must 
have exploded in her torpedo room for a bright 
flash of blue fire shot up through the hole for 
fifty feet and this was followed by a dense 
greenish smoke that rolled out as though she 
was a blast furnace. 

After a couple of misses Bill landed another 
shell on her stern and this one ripped an awful 
hole in her; the water poured into her and 


JACK HEATON 


190 

amid a series of explosions that threw steam- 
ing water into the air like yonng geygrers, with 
much sizzling and hissing she went down stern- 
end on never to rise again. 

A great hurrah went up from all hands on 
our boat and our Commander commended Bill 
on his excellent shots. 

<< Three cheers for big Bill,’^ I shouted and 
the gobs responded with mighty lung-power. 

^‘That^s the way to swat ’em, eh, matey?” 
remarked Bill with grisly joy as we were clean- 
ing away the wreckage. 

‘T say it is. Bill,” I made reply. 


CHAPTER X 


A SIGNALMAN ON A SUBMARINE 

D ON’T think for a moment that Germany 
was the only country that had a fleet of 
submarines. The reason that her U-boats came 
to be so well known was because they had tor- 
pedoed the Lusitania and sunk helpless ships 
right and left no matter who was on them or 
what they carried. 

England and France had fleets of submarines, 
too, but as their warships had blockaded Ger- 
many’s ports there was nothing to torpedo. 
And when we declared war on the Kaiser, Uncle 
Sam began to build submarines just as he did 
chasers, merchant ships and everything else. 
Except airplanes, did you say? There was no 
such fizzle made of building submarines as for 
a time was made of building airplanes in the 
beginning of the war. Within a short time 
after we got started our Navy Department was 
abje to turn out a brand-new submarine every 


JACK HEATON 


192 

two weeks. Think of it! Once the kind and 
the size of the submarine we needed had been 
agreed upon by our naval experts, that is, 
standardized as it is called, machines and jigs 
were made by which each part was stamped 
out of a solid sheet of metal, and this was done, 
not in one or a dozen factories, but in hundreds 
of factories scattered all over the country and 
each of which made a single part. 

These parts were shipped to docks at various 
ports on the Atlantic seaboard and there artifi- 
cers of all kinds were ready to assemble them, 
that is, to put them together. Thus it was that 
in two weeks after the ore was mined it was 
made into parts, assembled and the submarine 
was ready for its perilous cruise. 

While the building of submarines was thus 
speeded up there was another factor that made 
for their efficiency as a destructive engine of 
war which was just as important as the boats 
themselves and that was the crews to man them. 
Aye, and there was the rub, for a crew could 
not be trained for this highly specialized work 
in less than two months’ time and sometimes it 
took three or four months. 

Because the submarine job was considered 


ON A SUBMARINE 


193 


an extra-hazardous one, volunteers were called 
for to man the boats and as an inducement for 
bluejackets to do so a good bonus, that is, ex- 
tra pay was offered. Now Bill Adams knew 
all about submarines, as I think I told you be- 
fore, for he had worked for the Holland Subma- 
rine Boat Company long before the world-war 
started. 

‘‘Let^s me and you go to it, matey, he said, 
in one of his bursts of patriotism; ‘4t isn’t quite 
as soft a snap as weVe got on this here chaser 
but we gets more time ashore and then we 
helps our Uncle Sammy. Besides I’ve made 
up me mind to buy me mother a flivver ; all the 
washladies in our neighborhood is ridin’ to 
and from work in them baby land-tanks of Mr. 
Ford’s, and I guess what they can do she can 
do, eh, matey?” 

< < "Why not ? ” I allowed. ‘ ‘ She ’s got a better 
right to ride in a motor car than a lot of those 
high-falutin’ women who live in glass conning 
towers on Fifth Avenue and never had a son 
to fight for Uncle Sam. They take everything 
and they give nothing.” 

‘‘Well, I wouldn’t quite say that, matey,” 
Bill answered thinking hard within the limits 


JACK HEATON 


194 

of his ability; used to be a kind of anarchist 
myself, I guess, as I always felt as how I’d like 
to throw a bomb — no, not a bum — into some of 
them swell places, but I’ve got all over it. 
Why? Because if it wasn’t for them big bugs, 
them rich Janes, there wouldn’t be any Red 
Cross, see? Every last one of ’em that is over 
eight and under eighty is handin’ out the coin, 
givin’ the glad hand and workin’ like gobs 
holystonin’ the decks and scrapin’ cable for 
us guys what’s in the navy and army. But 
I ’m askin ’ you, as man to man, matey, will you 
volunteer with me for submarine duty?” 

‘T’m willing to try anything once. Bill, and 
I’ll take a chance with you on this submarine 
deal,” I told him. 

So Bill and I signed up for submarine serv- 
ice and after the crew to which we belonged 
had had intensive training for several weeks we 
were assigned to the H-24 and we went down to 
Newport to man her. There the first time I 
saw her she was swinging from a crane high 
in the air for this was the way they launch these 
sea babies. She was simply lifted bodily from 
the dock where she was assembled, swung over 
the water and gently deposited on the surface. 


ON A SUBMARINE 


19? 

It was a good thing that I had had experi- 
ence on a submarine chaser for the quarters of 
this submarine were so small I couldn’t for the 
life of me see how her complement of men, of 
whom there were 36, including officers and sea- 
men, could get into the boat, much less live and 
do their work. I suffered a good deal at first 
because when we were all inside her there 
wasn’t anywhere to go, not even out, when she 
was submerged. In fact I felt very much as 
though I was riding in the drawing room of a 
Pullman, or locked up in jail, which is about the 
same thing. 

As when we were on the chaser, I was the 
wireless man and Bill was the gunner whose 
business it was to work the rapid fire gun on 
deck. Bill didn’t mind being in the close quar- 
ters of the submarine at all and I took it that he 
must have been one of those kids who thought it 
great fun to snake his way through a fifteen 
foot length of gas-pipe main that was just big 
enough around to let his body pass providing he 
didn’t get stuck. 

Do you know I always thought I was a sailor 
until I went on my first cruise in that subma- 
rine. But no, I’m no sailor and you can take 


JACK HEATON 


196 

it from me there were precious few of the others 
of our crew besides the commanding officer and 
Bill who were sure-enough tars of the old Nep- 
tune stripe. Idl bet you a dollar to a glass of 
grape-juice that of the thirty-six men on board 
— or shall I say in board — thirty of them were 
sea-sick. Of all the rolling and pitching a boat 
ever did 111 give the cake to 11-24, 

Not only that but when we were running light, 
that is when she was as high out of the water 
as she could get with all the water out of her 
ballast tanks, and we had rough weather I had 
to strap myself in my chair to keep from being 
thrown around the room. As one of the tor- 
pedo men used to sing, ‘^Mr. Captain, stop the 
ship I want to get out and walk,’^ and, indeed, 
I would have given my pay and the bonus to 
boot to have had my old job back again on the 
chaser. It was all BilPs fault and I didn’t 
mind telling him so either. 

‘T should worry, matey,” he would say, and 
that’s all the satisfaction I could get out of 
him. 

After the rookies got over being seasick we 
went out on pra’ctise trips when each man was 
taught all about the machinery and how to 


ON A SUBMARINE 


197 

work it. This was done so that in case a man 
was put out of action another could take his 
place. It didn^t take me very long to get hep 
to all the tricks for I already knew the ABC 
of oil engines, which again came in handy; 
storage batteries were right in my line and 
the rest of the machinery was pie for me. 

The 11-24 has a hull that is very much like a 
huge catfish, that is it has a blunt round head 
and the torpedo tubes, one on either side, look 
for all the world like a pair of great eyes; 
the body tapers off gracefully to a point at the 
tail and on this the direction rudder is attached. 
Two horizontal rudders, or hydroplanes as they 
are called, by which the submarine is given its 
diving angle, are fastened one to each side of 
her head and give the appearance of a pair of 
great lateral fins. 

Her hull is built up of thin but exceedingly 
strong sheets of steel and these are riveted to- 
gether in the same fashion as the hull of any 
steel ship. When you consider that the hull 
of a submarine must be able to stand a pressure 
of at least 200 pounds to the square inch — as 
much as a high pressure steam boiler — ^without 
collapsing when it is fully submerged it must 


JACK HEATON 


198 

be clear that the strongest steel plate which can 
be made must be used. 

A steel deck, or superstructure as it is called, 
covers the top of the hull from bow to stern, 
nearly, and on its middle sets the conning 
tower. A steering wheel and compass are 
fixed to the side of the conning tower so that 
the boat can be steered from the outside when 
she is running light or awash. 

A short mast, called a stanchion^ is also fixed 
to the conning tower and this carries the signal 
lights and holds one end of the aerial, the other 
end being fastened to the stern. It isn’t much 
of an aerial but as our submarine was built for 
coast patrol cruising we were never very far 
from shore. 

The inside of the hull is partitioned off into 
rooms, or compartments, and these can be shut 
off from each other by means of bulkhead doors 
and so made watertight. The purpose of these 
watertight compartments is to prevent the 
water from filling the whole boat if she should 
be unlucky enough to be hit by a shell or 
rammed by a ship. To my way of thinking 
watertight compartments seem to be of little 
use whether the boat be a submarine or the 


ON A SUBMARINE 


199 

largest ship. For instance when the Titanic 
was scrapped by an iceberg and the Lusitania 
was hit by a U-boat torpedo they both went 
down in a few minutes. 

I won’t try to tell you what all the different 
compartments have in them but some of them 
are most uncommonly interesting and these you 
should know about. The first is the conning 
tower with its periscope. When the submarine 
is running either light or awash and the weather 
is good the commander can see what’s what 
around him from the deck or from the bridge, 
as we call the top of the conning tower. When 
the weather is rough or an enemy is nigh he 
takes a look around through the ports, that is, 
watertight windows, in the conning tower. 

Should, however, the boat be submerged and 
the captain wants to size up the situation he 
permits only the top of her periscope to project 
out of the water and through this he scans the 
sea. Whenever I got a chance I used to look 
through the periscope. At first it was hard 
for me to make out a vessel on the surface be- 
cause the field of view was small and what with 
the boat rolling from port to starboard it 
seemed to me I was always looking at the water 


200 


JACK HEATON 


or the sky; but after awhile I got so I could 
take in whatever there was to see in between 
times. 

Our submarine had two periscopes, one of 
the older kind that you have to turn around in 
order to see the whole horizon, and the other, 
which was the latest style, showed the whole 
horizon at once with a magnified view of the 
ship or other vessel in the distance in the center. 
This scheme was a great invention as it pre- 
vented us from being attacked from behind un- 
awares. It was like having a third eye in the 
back of your head. 

Inside the conning tower are also speaking 
tubes and an electric system of lights and bells 
worked by pushbuttons and these run into all the 
compartments; by means of these intelligence 
transmission systems our captain could get in 
touch instantly with the chiefs of the crew in the 
engine, diving, torpedo and wireless rooms. 

There are also several instruments in the 
conning tower and among these is a depth 
meter y that is, a device that shows just how far 
below the surface of the water the boat is. An 
inclinometer which points out the angle at which 
the diving rudder, or hydroplane is set, and a 


ON A SUBMARINE 


201 


tell-tale, that is a bank of miniature lamps, each 
of which is connected to a detector in a compart- 
ment. Now if the boat should spring a leak 
the detector closes the current and the lamp is 
lit. 

Then there is another electrical system that 
closes all the bulkhead doors by electricity. 
The instant the tell-tale lamp lights up and 
shows that a compartment is leaking the com- 
mander presses a button which rings a bell in 
it and this warns any of the crew who may 
happen to be in it to get out; by throwing a 
switch the current operating the motors which 
work the bulkhead door is cut in and the door 
is screwed down watertight. Should a shell 
put the conning tower out of commission the 
boat can still be steered from the navigating 
room in her hull. 

The power plant that drove the 11-24 was a 
big 12-cylinder oil burning engine that devel- 
oped, I should say, about 3,000 horse-power and 
it worked on the same general plan as a motor 
car engine. Now when the boat runs light or 
awash the engine drives her propeller direct 
and at the same time the engine runs a dynamo 
and this charges a large storage battery. 


202 


JACK HEATON 


But when the boat is running submerged the 
engine has to be shut down because the burnt 
gases cannot exhaust into the water as the pres- 
sure of the latter is too great. A powerful 
electric motor is coupled to the propeller shaft 
and this is energized by 'the current from the 
storage battery. 

The ballast tanks into and from which water 
is pumped to make the boat sink and rise is in 
the middle of the bottom of the hull. The tor- 
pedo room is forward in the bow of the boat, our 
sleeping quarters aft of this and my wireless 
room lay between our sleeping quarters and the 
navigating room. 

While life on the submarine was not exactly 
what you would call a pleasure bout still we 
were all keyed up to the point where we wanted 
to get in our fine work on the hoches. Finally 
the time came when we received orders to move 
and while only the officers knew where to or for 
what purpose at the time of departure we were 
all let into the secret after we had got under 
way. 

At the beginning of the war the Germans had 
vessels of various sizes in all parts of the world. 
Those that were in our ports were interned 


ON A SUBMARINE 


203 

while some of the smaller ones that were at sea 
became pirate ships, technically known as raid- 
ers. They flew the flag of Germany when it 
snited them to do so but they hoisted any flag 
that would best help out their diabolical plans. 

These raiders scoured the seven seas and 
whenever they ran across an unarmed merchant 
ship bound for any port of the Allies they 
promptly shelled and sunk her and, more often 
than not, without giving the ill-fated crew 
enough time to take to the life boats. As Bill 
Adams used to say, calls it murder.^’ 

Of course if the raiders could have taken their 
prizes to their own ports they would gladly 
have done so for -Germany sorely needed what- 
ever cargoes they carried, but the raiders could 
not do this for the Allies h-ad blockaded every 
port of the Central Powers. This being true 
the next best thing to do from the German point 
of view was to sink the ship and drown the 
crew. 

There were two or three of these German 
raiders steaming up and down our Atlantic 
coast and they operated a few hundred miles 
off shore and out of the beaten paths. It 
seemed likely that they worked, part of the time 


204 


JACK HEATON 


at least, in conjunction with U-boats for when- 
ever a ship went forth armed a torpedo sank 
her but if she was unarmed the raider’s guns 
sent her to the bottom. 

Uncle Sam was getting mighty tired of this 
sort of business and so he hatched up a little 
scheme. A small steamer, the Henrietta y was 
fitted out without guns, painted a sea-gray and 
flew the stars and stripes when she was sent to 
sea. Our submarine was sent with her, not 
exactly as a convoy for she was not sailing for 
any overseas port but instead she was sent out 
simply as a decoy. 

We followed her at a distance of about a mile 
-and as long as there were no other ships in 
sight we ran light, though the way the waves 
broke over her she seemed to be running awash 
most of the time. This made no difference to 
us and it was a great relief to come up from our 
stuffy holes and walk the deck. Of all my sea- 
going experiences I liked this much the best. 

Why? You know how a city chap with a 
drop of red blood in his veins likes to get out in 
the woods and walk, eat and sleep on the ground. 
He does it simply because he gets as close to 
nature as he ever can and know about it. Well, 


ON A SUBMARINE 


205 

when I walked the bit of deck of the E-24 I got 
just as close to the sea as I could and yet stay 
above water and there was a mighty fascination 
about it too. 

We cruised about most of the time in a light 
condition, though we occasionally had to -sub- 
merge and tagged around after the Henrietta 
which acted as a base, or mother-ship to us. 
It was a curious thing how merchant ships that 
made every effort to keep out of (the way of 
raiders would run right into them and that the 
Henrietta who was out for this very purpose 
couldn ^t meet up with anything more dangerous 
than a sea-gull. 

But hold, matey, what’s that the Captain of 
the Henrietta sends over by wireless? We 
can’t see the ship for we set too close to the 
water but he can make it out very well with his 
glasses. We dive until we are completely sub- 
merged but stiU following in the wake of the 
Henrietta according to a prearranged scheme. 

^‘Ship headed for us,” the Henrietta's Cap- 
tain signaled our Commander by our sound con- 
duction system. 

^^She flies the French flag,” he sent to us 
next. 


2o6 jack HEATON 

Then later on I got this and handed it to our 
commander : 

^‘Believe she^s a German raider/’ 

Every man was at his post and ready and 
anxious to do his duty. When the raider, 
which was the Koln and one of the worst of- 
fenders of her kind, was within half-a-mile of 
the Henrietta she sent a shot over her bow and 
signaled her to stand hy. This she did and 
then the Captaiu of the Koln signaled that he 
would send his officers to examine her papers 
and cargo — to get whatever gold she might have 
— and this he promptly did. At the same time 
he had her guns trained on the helpless Hen- 
rietta to prevent her from trying to steam away 
or putting on all speed and ramming her with 
her sharp bow. 

Just as the officers of the Koln were being 
lowered in a launch the Captain of the Hen- 
rietta signaled our commander just two words 
and these were: ‘‘Torpedo her.” 

We came to the surface about a thousand 
feet from and on the port side of the Koln and 
took her completely by surprisa Her gun- 
ners began blazing away at us but they had evi- 
dently not been trained in the gentle art of 



OUR TORPEDO PASSED THROUGH THE RAIDER’S HULL AND 
EXPLODED INSIDE — Page 207 



ON A SUBMARINE 


207 


swatting submarines for the trajectory of their 
shells was way too flat, that is it was not curved 
enough and with, possibly, two exceptions they 
struck the water and instead of sinking they 
ricocheted y that is they were thrown from it 
again on the same principle that a flat stone 
skips along on the water when you throw it 
nearly parallel to its surface. 

Bill was right there with his semi-automatic 
and dropped a couple of shells on the deck of 
the Koln. In less time than it takes to tell it 
to you our commander had swung our sub- 
marine round so that one of her torpedo tubes 
was pointed directly at the Koln and gave the 
signal to the officer of the torpedo crew to shoot 
the torpedo. He turned on the compressed air 
which drives the torpedo from its tube and it 
shot out and into the sea. We watched it with 
all eyes as it traveled like a blue streak under 
its own power below the surface and dead on 
for the broadside of the Koln. 

The German crew saw the white trail it left 
behind and they must have become panic- 
stricken for some of them jumped overboard, 
others manned the lifeboats and bungled the 
job so that two of the boats capsized before 


2o8 


JACK HEATON 


they ever touched the water. In less than a 
minute the torpedo struck the hull amidships, 
passed through it to the inside and exploded 
with a terrific report. 

It looked to me as if the whole ship was 
thrown bodily out of the water by the sheer 
force of the explosion and then parted in her 
middle. As she settled down on the water a 
great black cloud of smoke poured out of her 
hold and when the air struck her she caught 
fire and was soon a solid, seething sheet of 
flame. It was the most magnificent spectacle 
I have ever seen from longitude 0 to 70 degrees 
west of Greenwich and from the Equator to the 
Pole. 

Different from the German idea of kidtur, 
instead of letting the crew of the Koln drown, 
the Captain of the Henrietta sent out boats and 
stood by until all of them were picked up and 
on board his ship. 

We then sailed back to our naval base where 
the German crew was taken off and interned in 
a concentration camp until the war ended. 
Their fighting days were over while on the 
other hand mine had just commenced. 


CHAPTER XI 


WITH THE FIELD AETILLERY IN FRANCE 

T he strain from being cooped np in the 
small and stntfy quarters of the H-24 was 
beginning to tell on me and the blind way in 
which we had to manoeuver did not make me 
care for the life so I bethought me it would be 
a nice change to get into the flying game. 

Moreover my arm had begun to pain me con- 
siderably at times and so I determined to get a 
disability discharge. This was not a hard 
thing to do for any one with a heart need not 
be told that a man with a game arm should not 
be made to continue in active service if he 
didn ’t want to. 

Consequently in February I received my dis- 
charge and after seeing my folks I concluded 
it would be best to have my arm operated on 
to remove the stiffness. This I did and after 
the plaster casts that had been around it for a 
month were removed I was once again the 
209 


210 


JACK HEATON 


owner of two good, strong, healthy arms and 
in every way fit for service of any kind should 
I care to enlist again. 

To get a commission as a lieutenant in the 
Flying Corps was not as easy as I thought it 
would he and I found the whole machinery of 
making an application so clogged with red-tape 
that the farthest I was able to get was to satisfy 
the insatiable curiosity of military authorities 
as to everything pertaining to myself, parents 
and even down to the dimensions of my great 
grandmother’s left ankle. I was simply out 
of luck ! 

The more I thought about it, though, the more 
I was determined to get to France where the big 
game was going on. So one bright May morn- 
ing I went down to a recruiting station at 42nd 
Street and 6th Avenue, New York, with an en- 
tirely original idea and that was to enlist in 
the cavalry. I picked the cavalry because I 
thought the outdoor life would help to build me 
up and that riding a horse would not make my 
feet as sore as marching. 

While I could have enlisted in the Signal 
Corps as a wireless operator I believed my 
chances for seeing red blooded life overseas 


WITH THE FIELD ARTILLERY 211 

were better if I joined one of the common or 
line branches of the service. Having eaten a 
salt mackerel for breakfast and washed it down 
with a bucket of water (I was a little under- 
weight) I went down to the recruiting station. 
In a crowded downstairs room filled with a 
crew of other fellows waiting to enlist I filled 
out a card giving my age, residence and con- 
sent to be enlisted should I pass the physical 
examination which was held every couple of 
hours. 

We were stripped of our clothes, lined up in 
a row and one by one we were examined by the 
recruiting officer who put us through eye, foot, 
breathing and other like test^. I had hard 
work to keep my game arm from failing me but 
I came through all right. Finally I was 
weighed in, cautioned against the extreme pen- 
alties of lying and then asked all about my 
past life. The officer in charge of the station 
was next called in and gave each of us a little 
physical inspection of his own, with the result 
that he threw out a few of the candidates as be- 
ing unfit. Sixteen had been accepted and — oh, 
joy — I was one of them. 

This done we dressed, signed a register which 


212 


JACK HEATON 


showed we had been accepted, were given sealed 
orders and transportation and told to report 
to Fort Slocum, on New York Harbor. After 
a long ride on the subway, trolley and govern- 
ment ferry I arrived at Fort Slocum. It is 
located on an island in the harbor and is formed 
chiefly of houses for the officers, regular bar- 
racks for the infantrymen, or doughboys as 
they are called, who are stationed there all the 
time, and a lot of wooden shacks and tents for 
the recruits who come in. 

The examination I was given at the recruit- 
ing station wasnT a marker to that which I re- 
ceived at Fort Slocum and as a result it was not 
until the night of the day after I got there that 
I was sworn in and duly became a recruit in the 
cavalry of the United States Army. 

I stayed at Fort Slocum for the better part of 
two weeks waiting patiently for the time when 
I should hear my name called among the others 
of the daily outgoing list, and be one of the re- 
cruits to go away to be trained. I had hoped to 
be sent to Texas for my training but when at 
last I was on the outbound list it was for Fort 
D. A. Eussell, Wyoming. 

After a four-day ride on a troop train we 


WITH THE FIELD ARTILLERY 213 

arrived at Fort Russell wMcli is about three 
miles from Cheyenne. There our cars were 
switched onto a siding and we landed just as the 
sun was setting in the golden west. And say, 
man, as far as the eye could reach except in one 
direction, where there were mountains, the land 
was as level as the sea in a doldrum. Oh, why, 
oh, why, did I ever leave my happy berth on the 
H-241 

Up to the time of our arrival the Fort had 
not been occupied except by the officers and a 
few old service men from the Mexican border 
who were to act as non-commissioned officers 
while we were being trained. A few of the offi- 
cers were at the post station and we — there 
were about 200 all told — ^were marched over to 
headquarters where the troop commanders 
were waiting for us. 

Teamsters, horseshoers, clerks and recruits 
having other trades of a useful kind were picked 
from the bunch and assigned to troops. If I 
had wanted to I could have been a troop-clerk 
which carries with it a CorporaPs warrant but 
since I had enlisted I made up my mind to go 
in as a common trooper and get my share of rid- 
ing and my fill of drilling — both of which I did 


JACK HEATON 


214 

— like the rest of them. So it came about I was 
assigned to M Troop, 315th Cavalry, U. S. A. 

Now Wyoming is ditferent from the Amazon 
country in that there are no trees and the 
ground is covered with short, sunburned buffalo 
grass. From the post I could see the Eocky 
Mountains a hundred miles away and from this 
you may conclude that after Nature got tired 
of making all the other countries she made 
Wyoming — but not so, for Arizona came after. 

To make up for whatever the scenery may 
have lacked the post was a marvel and neither 
money nor labor had been spared to make it 
comfortable. Vve been in apartment houses 
on Riverside Drive that couldn’t hold a candle 
to it. There were large two story brick bar- 
racks with big squad rooms where we bunked 
and a big mess hall where we ate. In front of 
the barracks was the drill ground and there for 
an hour and a half every morning we did the 
dismounted drill of the cavalryman and then 
the rest of the morning was given over to equi- 
tation, which in every day American means 
riding. 

Our horses were of the genuine western va- 
riety and — woe be me — ^most of them had never 


WITH THE FIELD ARTILLERY 215 

been ridden before except once or twice per- 
haps, by the wranglers of the remount stations. 
This being true the eastern recruits spent the 
best part of the time between the horses ^ backs, 
the air and finding a soft place to land. A 
fellow could lash himself to a stanchion in a 
submarine but never to the back of a bucking 
broncho. 

Along about this time Cheyenne held its an- 
nual Frontier Day. This consists of gathering 
the best riders and ropers from all over the 
United States who compete for the glory there 
is in it though not overlooking the big purses 
offered. All through Frontier Day — or week, 
it should be called — Cheyenne slipped back half 
a century. The city was filled with booted and 
spurred cowpunchers from every ranching 
state in the Union. They wore sombreros and 
shirts of every color the rainbow affords. Then 
out at the race track at Frontier Park I saw 
such feats as squaw races, trick riding and 
fancy roping; roping, throwing and hog tying 
a steer in 23 seconds — the world’s record — 
and bull-dogging a steer. I pined for my old 
pal Bill Adams to see these landlubber stunts. 

After four months of drill and riding, pistol 


2i6 


JACK HEATON 


ajid rifle practise on the target range, in fact 
just as we were beginning to consider ourselves 
old cavalrymen, we were given a sudden jolt by 
being told that no more cavalry would be sent 
overseas and that we would be changed to light 
field artillery. Now there are a couple of lines 
in an old army song that run like this : 

‘‘The Infantry for bravery, 

The Artillery for slavery.’^ 

We were a badly disappointed crew, but a 
good soldier is one who obeys orders no matter 
how tough they are and we were good soldiers. 
In due course of time we were shipped to West 
Point, Kentucky, where we were to receive our 
artillery training in seventy-two days and then 
go overseas. 

Because I had been a wireless, or radio, op- 
erator as it is now more often called, and be- 
cause wireless is an important part of artillery 
I was immediately picked to go to the radio- 
school. I laughed at the idea of my going to 
radio-school. What’s the use when I am al- 
ready an expert operator and had been in the 
Navy? But I found out there were still a few 
things I could learn about wireless. 


WITH THE FIELD ARTILLERY 217 

In the artillery the eyes of the army, which is 
the aviation section, provides the artillery with 
airplane and balloon service and in order to co- 
operate successfully with them the wireless 
operator must have a special training. For 
three weeks or so we did nothing but huzser 
practise; that is a buzzer, which is an electric 
bell without the bell, is connected in circuit 
with a battery, a telegraph key and some twenty 
head-phones. The beginners put on the re- 
ceivers and an instructor worked the key. 

As I could easily take twenty words a minute 
I was made an instructor. Then there were lec- 
tures on the elements of electricity and magnet- 
ism and by the end of the first month the class 
was ready for the fundamentals of wireless te- 
legraphy. All of that was old stutf for me and 
as they say in the army it was picMn^s. 

The time came when we were introduced to 
the real wireless apparatus and although the 
sets were portable and of shorter range than 
any I had handled since I was a kid operator 
they were certainly beauties. There were 
three different types or wireless sets ; each one 
was designed to cover a certain distance, and 
each isending set had its special receiving set. 


2i8 


JACK HEATON 


The range of the smallest set was about a mile, 
while that of the largest was about twenty-five 
miles. These are very short ranges but enough 
for army purposes where messages are sent 
from the trenches through one operator after 
another or relayed until they reach headquar- 
ters. 

As I said before the purpose of the wireless 
stations is to cooperate with airplanes and bal- 
loons and aid in the control of artillery fire. 
So in the months that followed our work was 
to go out on the firing range with the batteries 
and to cooperate with the airplanes and 
balloons. 

I had been warranted as Corporal in charge 
of the 2nd Battalion Radio Detail. You know, 
I suppose, that a regiment consists of two bat- 
talions, each battalion of three batteries, each 
battery of four guns and the complement of 
about 200 odd men necessary for their action. 
So my detail was responsible for coordinating 
the eyes, that is the airplanes and balloons of 
the three batteries in the second battalion, with 
the guns. 

Possibly you may wonder why it is necessary 
for airplanes to work with the batteries and 


WITH THE FIELD ARTILLERY 219 

here is the answer : the guns, or pieces as they 
are called, were American 75 ^s, that is, the bore 
of the gun is 75 millimeters in diameter, and as 
the range they are fired over is seldom less than 
two miles some one must spot the fire, that is 
see just where the shells hit around the target 
and then tell the gun crew so that they can 
point their guns more accurately, all of which 
is called directing the fire. 

Now an airplane can do this to perfection but 
there must be some kind of communication es- 
tablished between it and the battery, and this 
is where we came in with our wireless. I had 
five men in my detail, there being two operators 
and three panelmen and of the latter and their 
work I will 'tell you later. 

Our regular performance each day was like 
this : The batteries would go out to the range 
in the morning, place their guns and set up 
their B. C. stations, that is. Battery Com- 
mander stations where the Battery Commander 
would be located within a few feet of the pieces 
to work out any problems that might arise in 
aiming them. 

With the detail and accompanied by a second 
lieutenant, who was the officer in charge, we 


220 


JACK HEATON 


would arrive at the range a few minutes before 
one o’clock which was the time the batteries 
were scheduled to fire. The operators and the 
panelmen would get busy setting up the aerial 
wire system. This consisted of two jointed 
masts about fifteen feet high and each one of 
which was made in five sections. 

The masts would be set up about a hundred 
yards apart and a single aerial wire was 
stretched between them. The leading-in wire 
was then connected to a receiving set and the 
latter to the groimd. This was formed of a 
pair of wires stretched on the ground directly 
under the aerial wire and to each of their free 
ends a copper mat was fixed with a little dirt 
thrown over it. 

The whole equipment is so built that we used 
to set it up ready for work in from three to five 
minutes. The operators then adjusted their 
head-phones and were ready to tune-in the in- 
coming signals from the airplane as soon as 
it should come in sight. You see, our detail on 
the ground only received wireless signals from 
the airplane while the operator in it, or observer 
as he is called, only sent wireless signals. This 
one sided arrangement had to be used because 





THE AIRPLANE SIGNALED DOWN TO US IN CODE 







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■”‘-vV- \->a 

















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>M« ^ - ^ ^ 




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■t .7 


icr 







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I 






i . > 

. viii>r.,:iH€ ; 


V .i y." 



.' : ■' ;'Si'!^'_ li: 


WITH THE FIELD ARTILLERY 221 


the propeller makes so much noise that the op- 
erator in the airplane would have trouble in 
reading the signals. In order to signal to the 
airplane as she flew above us we used a system 
of panels. 

This consists of a large piece of white cloth 
about twelve feet square spread out on the 
ground and three strips of white cloth twelve 
feet long and a couple of feet wide. These 
strips are laid in different positions relative to 
the square and each position has a number that 
means an order which the observer in the air- 
plane also knows. 

Further a small black square about eighteen 
inches on the side is placed on the big white 
square so that the observer can tell which bat- 
talion the outfit belongs to. The different posi- 
tions of the strips and square are given num- 
bers and the panelmen as well as the observer 
know what order each number means. As the 
panels can be arranged in twenty-seven differ- 
ent positions it is just about as hard to learn 
the panel code as it is the Morse alphabet. 

Now as soon as the wireless apparatus has 
been set up the panelmen put out their big 
square and one strip at the end of it, and when 


222 


JACK HEATON 


the airplane conies close enough to see the pan- 
els he knows that we want him to designate, 
that is to name the target which the battery is 
to fire at. This he sends to us by wireless and 
our operators write it down. 

While our detail was setting up the wireless 
apparatus, the telephone detail from our outfit 
had run a wire line from our B. C. station to the 
batteries which are several hundred yards 
ahead of us. When our operators get the tar- 
get, or pin-point as it is called, from the ob- 
server in the airplane, he (the operator) phones 
it to the battery commander who orders the 
guns set for it. 

The airplane then signals down to us in code 
and asks ‘4s the battery ready?’’ The tele- 
phone man tells us that the battery is ready and 
the panelmen put out No. 5, which means “the 
battery is ready.” The airplane observer 
sends down our operators yell the order 

to the telephone man who in turn shouts it into 
the mouthpiece of his ’phone ; the ’phone oper- 
ator at the battery end informs the Battery 
Commander and he gives the order when the 
guns are fired either by piece, that is one at a 
time, or by salvo, which is all at once. 


WITH THE FIELD ARTILLERY 223 

We immediately put out No. 8 panels which 
mean that ^Hhe battery has fired. Shrapnel 
is used during these trial shots as the observer 
in the airplane can easily see by the bursts just 
how far or close they come to the target and 
this is what he does. After having seen where 
the shots landed the observer flies back over our 
station and signals down to us the number of 
yards to the right or left of the target and 
short or over the shots landed. 

The telephone man sends this to his Battery 
Commander, who computes the necessary cor- 
rection in aiming the gun, and the performance 
of signaling and firing is repeated until every 
shot becomes a target, that is, hits squarely on 
the mark. 

At intervals of half-an-hour the balloon sta- 
tion, that is, the captive balloon, sends out me- 
teorological data, which means weather reports, 
chief of which are the barometer readings, by 
wireless and this we get and transmit to the B. 
C. station by telephone. At 4 p. m. the batter- 
ies cease firing, we take down and pack up our 
station and go back to camp. 

As I have said we repeated this performance 
for a month until we were letter perfect in co- 


224 


JACK HEATON 


operating with the airplanes. And then one 
morning almost without a word of warning we 
were told to pack up our personal equipment. 
We turned over the wireless apparatus to the 
supply officer of the company and by evening 
we were on our way to Camp Mead, Maryland, 
which was one of the ports of embarkation for 
overseas men. We spent ten glorious days at 
Camp Mead without a tap of work to do. 

On the morning of the eleventh day we 
boarded a big three stack troop-ship, weighed 
anchor and by noon we were off for France. 
To most of the men aboard, many of whom had 
never seen the ocean before, and some of them 
were never to see it after, the voyage was a 
great joy or a big sorrow according to the states 
of their stomachs, but to me it was a long and 
tiresome trip. The ship had been altered from 
a floating palace into a purveyance which would 
carry the greatest number of men it was pos- 
sible to crowd into her. 

On the morning of the eighth day after we 
had embarked we landed at Liverpool and were 
given a royal reception by the enthusiastic 
Britons. The way they warmed up to us was a 
revelation to me for I had no more idea that an 


WITH THE FIELD ARTILLERY 225 

Englishman could change his attitude toward 
an American than that a jaguar could change 
his spots. The miracle had come to pass never- 
theless. 

From Liverpool we went on to London riding 
in first class compartment coaches as if we 
owned the railroad. We were in Lunnon, old 
dear, for a week in which time we paraded, 
and were dined and petted as if each man-jack 
of the whole bloomin’ outfit was a Beau Brum- 
mel, a Count D’Orsay, a Lord Byron, or some 
other dandy of a century before. I forgot en- 
tirely that a world-war was going on across 
the Channel and that we were over there to fight 
monsters of the kind that bayoneted babies, in- 
stead of living like dukes. 

Then one night we were slipped in darkness 
from Folkestone across the English Channel to 
Calais. If the joy of the British in seeing us 
two thousand strong was great it wasn’t a 
marker to that of the French who cheered us as 
we marched through the streets of Paris, and 
later when the batteries had been dismissed 
they opened their arms to us — especially the 
demoiselles. Talk about morale, why I could 
have licked a dozen hoches with my left arm tied 


226 


JACK HEATON 


back of me. That was the kind of fighting men 
the Hindenburg line had to go np against. 

A couple of weeks later we were joined by 
our 75 ^s and horses which had been shipped 
across on a different boat. From that time on 
we moved by forced marches until we were only 
twenty miles back of the fighting line. For a 
month we were held in reserve and each day 
we would go out, as did numberless other bat- 
teries, set up our station and work with our 
airplane as we had done at West Point. 

We were getting pretty tired of it for we 
wanted to see action and there right ahead of 
us was the big adventure where there was action 
a-plenty. At last one day came the call we had 
looked forward to so long and we marched 
under cover of the night to our position some- 
where between the Argonne foothills and Cha- 
teau Thierry. 

When daylight broke a most amazing sight 
spread out before us for there was a string of 
75 ’s stretching on either side of our battery as 
far as the eye could reach and forming an al- 
most solid wall. There was no trench fighting 
going on here, just open warfare between ar- 
tillery, that’s all. 



“BUT FOR EVERY ONE THE BOCHES SENT WE PUT OVER TWO 

OR THREE ” — Page 226 





WITH THE FIELD ARTILLERY 227 

The registering of the batteries was guessed 
at so that the enemy would be taken by surprise 
and he was. The command to fire was given 
and we let go a howling hurricane of shells that 
deluged the enemy. The German guns rallied 
to meet our attack and from that time on a 
royal artillery duel was on. Once under cover 
of a heavy barrage their shock troops came on 
only to be mowed down by us at point blank 
range. 

Talk about fire and brimstone of the infernal 
regions, it is a feeble place of punishment as 
against the hades let loose in our sector that 
morning. Shells were screaming through the 
air and bursting all around us but for every 
one the boches sent we put over two or three. 
Our men were dropping but we kept the guns 
going as if they were fed and fired by ma- 
chinery. 

A shell had put our wireless equipment out 
of action, killed a couple of our men, wounded 
a couple more and stunned me for a few min- 
utes. When I came to I went over to the bat- 
tery and was giving the gunners a hand. 
Planes were darting back and forth over us 
and every little while terrific battles took place 


228 


JACK HEATON 


between our fliers and the boches for the su- 
premacy of the air. Suddenly I saw the air- 
plane attached to our battery fighting half a 
dozen enemy planes, which was often the case 
for the Germans had four or five times as many 
airplanes as we had at that time. 

Our airplane had caught on fire and she fell 
within 300 yards of our lines. I saw one of 
our airmen crawl from her and then fall over on 
the ground. I crept out in a rain of bursting 
shells to where our machine lay and managed to 
extricate Flight Lieutenant Eoss from the de- 
bris and as good luck would have it he was not 
much hurt. Then I lifted Observer Gilfillan 
onto my back and we started for our line. 
When we were within a hundred feet of it a 
sliver from an exploding shell struck me in the 
leg and shivered it. I crawled back and another 
man brought Gilfillan the rest of the way. 
After being treated at the field hospital we were 
removed to the base hospital where I was decor- 
ated. Soon after I was sent to Paris and since 
it was clear I could no longer be of service I was 
returned home and discharged, and — here I 
am. That’s the thumb-nail sketch of how I did 
my bit for Uncle Sam. 


CHAPTER XII 


MUSTBKED OUT 

J ACK HEATOX and I had just finished our 
goulash at Moquin’s on Sixth Avenue 
(New York), and the w^aiter, under the stimulus 
of a piece of money, graciously removed the 
table cloth as he had been asked to do on twelve 
previous occasions. 

I took a couple of quires of blank paper out of 
my brief case and laid them in front of me ; then 
I produced a pair of fountain pens, one filled 
with black ink and the other with red ink, the 
latter for writing on chapter headings and put- 
ting in such corrections as might be necessary, 
and all of which showed without any deduction 
that I was in for a writing spell. 

‘^Well, Jack, we Ve got down to the last chap- 
ter and this sitting will finish it,’’ I started off 
encouragingly. 

‘H’ve told you all my experiences and if 
there’s any more to be said I guess you’ll have 

229 


230 JACK HEATON 

to say it, Mr. Collins,’’ remarked the bored 
young soldier. 

^‘No, my boy,” I said firmly, ‘‘there are 
still some outstanding features about wireless 
I want to talk over with you, and besides I have 
never turned in a script to my publishers that 
had less than twelve chapters, that is, except a 
shortcut arithmetic and the shorter a book of 
that kind is the better.” 

“I don’t know of any outstanding features 
as you call them; it seems to me I’ve told you 
everything that ever happened to me. What 
else can I say?” protested the young man. 

“Give me your version of how we met, tell 
how you looked in that natty overseas uniform, 
how I looked, what is on your mind now and 
all that sort of thing. Then we’U discuss the 
wireless transmission of power, wireless air- 
ships and submarines, talking to Mars and 
finally about the diamond fields of South Am- 
erica for I’m as interested in them as your 
friend Bill Adams,” I suggested. 

Jack laughed. 

“Why, if I painted a word picture of you I’m 
afraid you and I’d part company.” 

“Hardly, my boy, hardly,” I reassured him. 


MUSTERED OUT 


231 


‘‘IVe gone through war, or what war is; IVe 
licked a couple of would-be Kaisers myself and 
I’m going after a few more of them before I 
have done with life. I am, forsooth, a bit bat- 
tle scarred but my skin is as thick as that of 
a rhinoceros. Any little thing that you might 
say about me I’d be delighted to jot it down.” 

‘‘Let’s see,” reflected Jack, “when we left 
off yesterday I had just been discharged from 
the hospital and was back with my folks in 
Montclair. When I was able to get around I 
wanted to see Broadway and came over one 
morning with dad. I was feeling bully as I 
was strolling down the trail when suddenly I 
■spied a man I once knew although I hadn ’t seen 
him in years, no, not since I was a kid operator 
learning wireless. 

“He was a tall, spare man like yourself, 
whose legs, as honest Abe once said, were long 
enough to reach to the ground. He might have 
been anywhere up to a hundred and five, by 
which I mean his age and not his weight; at 
any rate he had surely seen fifty summers and 
heaven only knows how many hard falls. 

“He was slightly stoop-shouldered, which I 
suspect was due to his sticking to his desk too 


232 


JACK HEATON 


closely, or, perchance, because he couldn’t 
shake the weight of his own tragedies from 
them. His face was pale, quiet and cadaverous, 
but whatever troubles he may have had and 
however many, they seemed not to have attacked 
his hair for it was all there, nearly, — though 
I didn’t count ’em — ^with not a gray one to mar 
their beautiful mouse-like color. In truth, he 
dressed like you, looked like you and, by gravy, 
he was you, Mr. Collins.” 

Jack laughed heartily at this photo-impres- 
sion of his old friend and I was glad to know 
that after all he had gone through with here, 
there and everywhere and the pain he had suf- 
fered and was suffering even then, he was still 
able to see the humor in so grisly a subject. 
I laughed, too, just to show him that I had 
not yet given up the ship and, hence, there was 
still hope for us both. 

‘‘Turn about is fair play and now that you 
have given a word picture of me I’ll give one 
of you. As I remember our meeting it was 
like this: I was hurrying up Broadway one 
morning when suddenly a young soldier stepped 
abruptly in front of me thereby barring any 
farther progress on my part. I observed he 


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233 


had a trim fighting figure and wore the uni- 
form we love so well. He wore puttees and 
limped somewhat hut from the medals he wore 
on his breast I judged that he had met the 
enemy and that they were his — and ours. 

‘^His was a fine, heroic face and the very way 
his over-seas cap set on the side of his head, his 
smiling eyes, his hearty laugh and the firm, 
smooth grasp of his hand was enough to show 
me that he was one of the brave boys from over 
there who had caught Hhe torch from failing 
hands and held it high in Flanders fields. ’ 

‘‘ ‘Don^t you remember me, Mr. Collins!^ he 
cried. H’m Jack Heaton, and you used to let 
me make things in your laboratory over in 
Newark when I was a kid!’ 

^Of course I remember you but, my, how 
you have grown. I never would have known 
you. You were rather a frail chap then and 
now you’re such a powerfully built young fel- 
low.’ And then we talked about you and all 
your experiences since I last saw you. I told 
you that you ought to write a hook and you 
said that there wasn’t much to write, and that 
if it was done I’d have to do it for you. 

^^Then we agreed we’d collaborate, you to 


234 


JACK HEATON 


furnish the experiences and I to write them out 
and I wanted to give you whatever was made 
from the sale of the book and that I would take 
the glory of having written it for my share of 
the profits; but you wouldn^t have it any other 
way but that we would divvy fifty-fifty.’^ 

‘‘That part was all right,” put in Jack, “but 
what made a hit with me was that you said you 
knew a publisher who would take the book and 
forthwith we drew up a provisional table of 
contents. Then we went over to your pub- 
lisher; you explained the idea to the editor and 
gave him the table of contents and we got the 
contract the next day. And do you know, Mr. 
Collins, that my leg began to feel better right 
away!” 

“That was some weeks ago. Jack, but I Ve en- 
joyed your company so much and have been so 
interested in what you’ve told me I wish we had 
it all to do over again. Well, Jack, we must 
to work again.” 

“All right, but before we get busy I want to 
tell you of a seance I once had with King Solo- 
mon. Do you believe in spirits — in wireless 
spirits ? ’ ’ 

“Heard of all kinds of wireless and several 


MUSTERED OUT 


235 

kinds of spirits but don ’t know the breed called 
wireless spirits/’ I admitted. 

was introduced to one in London. One 
evening an operator from one of the Red Star 
liners who was interested in magic, spiritualism 
and all that sort of thing, wanted me to go with 
him to see a performance of Maskelyn and 
DevanUs Mysteries at St. George ^s Hall in 
Langham Place, W. C. 

‘ ^ The mysteries of these mystifiers were mys- 
tical enough to mystify the most mysterious 
and I saw everything from the wonderful East 
Indian rope trick to the equally wonderful spirit 
rapping table. David Devant, the celebrated 
conjurer, exhibited the table and he said — 
and nobody in the audience disputed him — 
that the table possessed the ghostly property of 
connecting this world with the next, the quick 
with the dead, that which is now with that which 
is to be, and that it would rap out answers to 
any questions which might be asked to prove 
it. 

‘‘Some of the wiseacres present laughed 
lightly at the conjurer’s immaterial remarks 
but he assured them on his honor as a gentle- 
man its guiding spirit was no lesser an (astral) 


JACK HEATON 


236 

light than that of old King Solomorj himself. 
Thereupon Mr. Devant invited the audience to 
ply the immortal part of the departed wise man 
with any questions that might be fit and proper. 

‘‘Strangely enough while nobody believed in 
spirit communications as exemplified by the 
rapping table everybody was most anxious to 
ask some question which no one on this side 
of the borderland could answer. The replies 
that King Solomon rapped out were deep and 
philosophical although not always conforming 
to our ideas of ethics and morals. Indeed, his 
very first reply to a question, which was put 
by some guileless sutfragette, nearly broke up 
the show. She asked him, as Bill Adams would 
say ‘as man to man,’ how many wives a man 
should have, and in that she thought she had 
trapped him even though he was beyond the 
pale of the law. But Solomon showed his su- 
perior wisdom as usual and rebuked the lady 
by rapping furiously on the table until he had 
nearly eight hundred wives to his credit. 

‘ ‘ To convince the audience that the table was 
just a common, single legged, three footed one 
of the milliner’s variety the conjurer invited a 
committee to step up on the stage and examine 


MUSTERED OUT 


237 


it; I went up with several other men and we 
nearly had a private seance with old Sol. We 
examined the table and found it 0. K. ; to me 
it seemed a little top heavy but I made due al- 
lowance for this because King Solomon was 
a brainy man. 

‘^Now when the conjurer held it at arm’s 
length, or I did so as one of the committee, it 
kept right on rapping out replies from the gone 
but not forgotten spirit of the ancient King. 
Even when the table was passed through the 
audience — ” 

“You mean among the audience, don’t you. 
Jack? Even a spirit table would have hard 
work passing through the audience. ’ ’ 

“I stand corrected. Even when the table 
was passed among the audience it kept up its 
dark rappings to the great enjoyment of the 
audience. To me the rappings had a more or 
less mechanical sound as if King Solomon’s 
knuckles had turned to spirit gold, or common 
brass would do. 

“I figured it out that the raps were done wire- 
lessly, by which I mean that the top of the 
table was hollow and contained a small but 
sensitive receiver with a single stroke tapper 


JACK HEATON 


238 

and as the top of the table was made of a sheet 
of burnished copper and the three footed base 
was. of iron with the connecting leg between 
them of wood it seemed reasonable to suppose 
that these formed the aerial and ground. 

‘^Although I listened hard I couldn’t hear 
the faintest sound of a spark-gap working but 
it is an easy matter to put the transmitter in 
a sound-proof booth.” 

‘‘And thus doth a little science make big 
skeptics of us all. Now tell our young readers, 
J ack, how SOS came to take the place of C Q D, 
as the ambulance call of the sea.” 

“It came about in this way. In 1896 the 
International Wireless Telegraph Convention 
was held in Berlin. Germany’s wireless men, 
from her greatest scientists down to her lowly 
operators hated anything that had to do with 
or was used by Marconi, so instead of C Q 
they suggested that the letters >8 0 /S' be used. 
Unlile C Q D, the letters SOS have no especial 
meaning in themselves but they are easy to 
send and to read and make, -as a matter of fact, 
a good distress call. 

“While SOS, was probably sent out many 
times by various operators from that time on 


MUSTERED OUT 


239 


it did not become famous until the S. S. Kentucky 
went down otf the Diamond Shoals. Her op- 
erator did as many an operator had done be- 
fore him and has done since, that is, he kept 
sending the SOS call. Her engine room was 
rapidly filling with water but before her dyna- 
mos were submerged and put out of commission 
the operator on the Alamo of the Mallory Line, 
ninety miles away, heard the call. The Alamo 
reached the sinking ship just in time to save 
her passengers and crew before she went 
down. ’ ' 

‘‘Do you think it is possible to send a wire- 
less message around the world 

“Hot without relaying it. You remember 
back there in 1909 when all the small fry who 
were following in Marconi’s footsteps were 
trying to do something more wonderful than 
the great inventor? One of them made the 
statement that he had sent out a train of elec- 
tric waves from his high power station which 
traveled completely round the world and in a 
small fraction of a second he received the sig- 
nals on the same aerial ; and he was backed up 
in it by a college professor, too.” 

“I agree with you that college professors 


240 


JACK HEATON 


may sometimes be wrong, indeed they are 
nearly always so, ’ ^ I assured him. 

‘^Now any kid operator knows, continued 
Jack, ‘‘that electric waves are radiated to every 
point of the compass around an aerial and hence 
even if the waves sent out by it had enough 
power to go around the world they would meet 
on the opposite side of the earth and neutral- 
ize each other. 

“What do you think about signaling from 
the earth to Mars, Mr. Collins T’ 

“Not very much. It is never safe to predict, 
especially to make a negative prediction, by 
which I mean to say that a thing can^t be done. 
Simon Newcomb, the great astronomer and 
mathematician, proved by figures and the known 
laws of nature, to his own satisfaction and a 
good many others, that it was a physical im- 
possibility to build a man-carrying airplane. 

“Langley who was just as big a figure in 
the world of science believed that the thing 
could be done, built model after model that flew 
but when he built his big machine to be piloted 
by a man it fell before it got fairly into the 
■air. Yet the same year that he failed, the 
Wright Brothers, a couple of bicycle mechanics. 


MUSTERED OUT 


241 


put a gasoline engine in a glider and flew. 
Since then bombing airplanes have been built 
that will carry a ton or more. 

‘‘The moral is that if you must predict it is 
better to do so in favor of rather than against 
a proposition unless you^re betting on a horse. 
My opinion is that signaling to Mars will not 
be done by long electric waves set up by elec- 
tric sparks. Some years ago Tesla, the electri- 
cian, was reported to have received signals from 
Mars by long electric waves, that is wireless 
waves, while Pickering the astronomer got up 
a plan to reflect signals to the red planet by 
short electric, that is light waves. All he 
needed to do it with was ten million dollars’ 
worth of mirrors and by forming these into a 
gigantic reflector he opined he could concen- 
trate the light of the sun into a beam and throw 
it 'on the surface of Mars. 

“And this puts me in mind of Tesla’s scheme 
to transmit power wirelessly. To transmit 
power to run machinery and to control power at 
•a distance by wireless are two entirely differ- 
ent things. Since wireless waves tend to radi- 
ate in all directions parallel with the surface 
of the earth from an aerial, it is a very diffi- 


242 


JACK HEATON 


cult matter to transmit enough energy wire- 
lessly in any one direction to have a sufficient 
quantity left after it has passed through even 
a short distance to do useful work such as run- 
ning a motor. 

As early as 1905 Tesla took out patents for 
a system of wireless transmission of power in 
which he proposed to use the free ether of space 
instead of the ether in and around a wire to 
guide and carry it. He built a great tower at 
Wardenclitf, Long Island, New York, for the 
purpose of radiating power but nothing came of 
the experiments he made and after some years 
the tower was torn down. ’ ^ 

‘^You don’t believe then that it will ever be 
possible to transmit energy for power purposes 
by wireless?” 

^^On the contrary, I believe it is possible but 
other discoveries must be made before it can 
be done successfully and this is also true of 
many other things which have been and are 
still looked upon as physical impossibilities. 
As to controlling apparatus at a distance by 
wireless that is, of course, just as easy as send- 
ing a signal, in fact it’s the same thing. 

‘ ‘ Tesla was the first to control the movements 


MUSTERED OUT 


243 

of a boat at a distance by wireless and after 
him came many others. Even submarines have 
been so equipped and controlled but since the 
surface of the sea reflects most of the energy 
of the waves and absorbs the rest of it the boat 
must have its aerial above the surface at all 
times or the waves will not reach it. 

‘^Attempts to control airships by wireless 
have been made time without number but to no 
useful purpose for no etfective distance can be 
had between an airship and the sending station. 
Even sending wireless messages from airplanes 
as you said yesterday is only done over a very 
short distance and these limits are quickly 
reached because there is no way of grounding 
it.^’ 

‘^How do you think the distance could be in- 
creased Jack wanted to know. 

‘‘You are asking a hard question, my boy. 
It might be done by finding a certain length 
of wave that would have a carrying capacity 
through the ether comparable to that of light, 
yet be longer than a light wave and shorter than 
the wireless waves we use for transmitting over 
land and sea. But this is sheer speculation on 
my part. Well, Jack, we Ye all done and you 


244 


JACK HEATON 


see it wasn^t such a hard job as you thought. 
Before we go, though, I should like to know 
just what you expect to do in the future.’^ 

‘^Eeally, I don’t know, Mr. Collins, though 
I’ve been thinking pretty hard about it lately, 
too. You see, I’ve reached an age where I’ve 
got to boil down to business and make some 
money, but I don’t want any of that swivel- 
chair-at-a-desk-on-the-’steenth-floor-of-an-ofifice- 
building for mine. I’d get into the airplane 
game but there ’s no more money in it than there 
is in wireless. 

‘ ‘ My one best thought is to get a little party 
together, go down to Brazil and open up a 
diamond mine,” and he looked fondly at the 
glittering stone in his ring. 

^^What I’d like to do is to get Bill Adams 
and a few other kindred spirits to go with me, 
clean out the Capunicas, and,” his eyes bright- 
ened, ‘Tf you’ll join us I’ll make you King 
of the cannibals instead of old Oopla.” 

‘ ‘ Declined with thanks, ’ ’ I bowed regally, that 
is as regally as a man can bow whose back is 
already bent. haven’t the slightest desire 
to king it over any tribe of man-eaters, but if 
you will let me go with you in the capacity of 


MUSTERED OUT 245 

adviser, medicine man and book-maker I’ll con- 
sider it. ” 

‘‘Done, signed and sealed,” said Jack and 
we shook hands till we should get together on 
the proposition. 


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